During the next five hours, I tried repeatedly to get hold of customer service, and finally was told that the flight had been canceled because of bad weather, and so I would need to pay for the extra night’s stay at a hotel and any other expenses. Imagine my surprise Friday afternoon when I started receiving notices from Google calendar that the original flight was delayed (it was still on my calendar). If American Airlines canceled your flight because of the weather, then it owes you nothing. If, however, the flight was canceled for operational reasons — what’s referred to as a “mechanical” delay — then it does indeed have to provide for an overnight hotel stay and meal vouchers. Airline reservation systems can automatically rebook you on a reinstated flight, but you’d already made plans to fly the next day, so it wouldn’t have recognized your reservation as one that needed to be rebooked. “In the unlikely chance we do reinstate a flight, we do try to contact the traveler to let them know about the change,” an airline spokesman told me. Most times, travelers are already booked on other flights with different connections, if they are connecting. Question is, should this extra overnight stay be treated like a weather delay or a mechanical delay? The airline agreed to reimburse you for your hotel and offered a $200 voucher “due to the circumstances.”