Delta Air Lines had a meltdown of historic proportions after CrowdStrike’s glitch that everyone else recovered from quickly. They cancelled more flights in five days than they did in all of 2018 and 2019 combined. It cost them about $500 million, yet their CEO jetted off to Paris with his girlfriend for the Olympics while employees and passengers were working to recover. They continued to blame everyone but themselves.
After first refusing to cover the cost for passengers to fly on other airlines, and explicitly telling everyone that prepaid hotels booked through Delta wouldn’t be covered, they agreed to cover the cost of tickets some passengers purchased to get to their destination. Anyone who hadn’t been in a position to cover that themselves was just stuck, and the delay saved them money – as it is they say their failure cost them $500 million in less than a week.
Now, though, they’re trying to make it up to employees. As aviation watchdog JonNYC was first to report, Delta is giving employees two positive space passes for anywhere that Delta flies. Employees usually travel nonrevenue, space available for leisure. This lets them book confirmed travel. It’s costly to Delta, because it might displace a paying customer.
DL to employees: pic.twitter.com/cxkOtXpGpa
— JonNYC (@xJonNYC) August 2, 2024
Even now, in this message to employees, they call it at the beginning and the end “the CrowdStrike outage” as though they weren’t responsible. Delta has a lot of work to do to restore its brand image that earns them a revenue premium from customers mainly for reliability, and to restore the loyalty and trust of employees. Positive space travel is a start to make employees feel appreciated.
However what the outage has shown more than anything is Delta’s hubris. Nothing is their fault. CEO Ed Bastian even says he sassed Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, telling him Delta needs no reminding of its obligations to customers as they were stranding customers.
They have yet to take actual responsibility or detail how they’re preventing a similar long-tail event from bringing down their operations. Historically, while Delta operates well in normal times, they seem to struggle to recover from major outages. And that means there’s something about Delta that caused them to have greater challenges when everyone else recovered. Maybe it’s related to laying off IT staffers this past fall?
Standard DL response to any sort of meltdown. On average they do this every 3 years or so.
Premium!
AA did this once for their employees in appreciation for winning The Air Transport Award for best Airline in 2013 I beleive .We really enjoyed it . But I remember Doug Parker saying he would never do it again because it was way too costly.. Good for DL employees . They Deserve it .
If you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with BS. Typical Premium Delta Experience.
Talk about tone deaf…
Giving your employees free tickets when delta is making it a huge hassle for their customers to be reimbursed for their expenses…
Not defending Delta… They took way too long to recover their backend systems…
BUT
Could you imagine if Southwest would have been a CrowdStrike customer? No doubt they would STILL be recovering.
The thing is, these carries are trying to save/skimp on their backend systems as customers don’t see them. Those systems are old, monolithic platforms that can run OK during normal operations. But they don’t scale up like modern ones, so they pretty much grind to a fault during abnormally heavy loads.
The company I work for had over 20,000+ machines impacted by CrowdStrike. ALL servers were back online by 6am and by the end of that day, only about 3,500 end user workstations still needed to be touched. The fix for get a machine/server back online after the CrowdStrike mishap was simple..
Delta’s issue wasn’t getting their machines back up, it was getting their applications back online as when they did come back up, they could not scale up to handle the massive load.
Good for the employees. But eff the customers who were caught up in this S-storm.
Who cares what Ed is doing. I think he’s dreamy.
@MikeL – It didn’t SWA as long as it took Delta to fix their issues AND they REALLY took care of their customers with easy refunds for almost any expense incurred as well extra points to boot.
Domestic carriers are dead to me. Only a hopeful fool would willing fly on Delta, United, etc.
Secretary Pete has done an excellent job in handling this Delta debacle. He’s been publicly reminding both Delta and their passengers of Delta’s obligations and is encouraging complaints to be filed if Delta fails to live up to those obligations.
Of course, we’re seeing very little reporting of that here. Wonder why?
That’s nice. What are they doing to earn back the trust of customers??
Two tickets to anywhere? They should have given them the 12,500 Sky Pesos the customers received.
Forget employees. Sorry but paying customers always suffer with delta you do nothing for the paying public !
Forget employees. Sorry but paying customers always suffer with delta you do nothing for the paying public ! Ok so now you block my comment?
at least we all know their not premium now, unless having seatback entertainment and wifi is enough lol
What about Bastian’s whining to Crowdstrike lawyering up about the ‘unreimbrused’ costs – search for the stories.
What tone deaf blame game optics with all the inconvenience and cost Delta passengers incurred and waiting for reimbursement that hasn’t been completed.
Delta’s board needs to find accountability.
For those complaining that customers need to be looked after and not employees, you do know both can be done? One is a simple IT command to 80,000+ employees taking all of a few seconds to execute The other is individual review with crafted yet consistent responses among the similarly affected.
If your point is that employees should wait for the very last customer to be served before enacting that simple reward?… you clearly did witness the exhaustion of the staff selflessly serving you as others observed.. Unusual for a Delta clientele; don’t you belong fighting others in Ft Lauderdale gate areas of another carrier?
I think for Delta to do this freebee for all there flight attendants sends a very bad message to the public. They are pretty much saying that they don’t give a Damn about any of their customers at all, but they are willing to give away free/ paid tickets to there employees,which to me sends the Wrong message out. This sort of action will surely backfire on Delta and it should because they are choosing to Screw customers
To give there flight attendants the right to fly free while passengers were running around from desk to desk for days and sleeping in the airport with no food , let’s u know what kind of company this is , we pay much more for a ticket and get treated like peasants … shame on you
Bastian’s “juniority problem” comes back to haunt him, but, of course it is everyone else to blame. Chances are the experienced employees that were “retired” during Covid probably had the experience and knew how to restore backend systems or had work arounds in place that would’ve restored functionality earlier.
Experience in these types of situations can solve problems that newer employees have never encountered. Despite the massive bailouts with all of the airlines, the most experienced employees were “retired” during Covid and the newer employees are still learning how to position a jetbridge to get people off the of aircraft after gate arrival among other functions.
Someone will have to pay a little income tax on those positive space pleasure passes. Positive is only free when traveling on company business.
American was one of the fastest major domestic carriers impacted by the IT crisis to recover normal operations after the defective update went live, shortly after midnight on July 19. The company had to cancel more than 400 flights in the first 24 hours but only grounded 50 flights the following day, according to flight tracker FlightAware. Several dozen cancellations were due to weather at hubs. United took about 60 hours to recover and Delta took over 9 DAYS to fully recover. mayor Pete and the CS/MS lawyers will have a field day with Delta. The fines will be unprecedented.
Replacing Bastian with a CEO who doesn’t pull a Ted Cruz by running away in the middle of a crisis would do a lot to restore trust. So of course that’s not what’s happening. I’m so glad I ditched Delta after their third devaulation in a few months. During Covid.
Restore trust?!
@Gary You seem to be crapping on Delta when the story is about 2 passes it is providing employees. The compensation for employees is significantly less than providing a cash bonus since some of the seats employees take maybe empty and Delta is paying cost, not an advertised ticket price.
Based on the lines I saw at SLC two weeks ago, Delta frontline employees put the hours in to help their passengers when their IT systems were failing. It is a nice gesture from the airline and earned by the employees. For everyone piling on Delta, if you don’t like them, don’t fly them. I would much rather be flying Delta, than a ULCC.
What Delta is doing to make things right for customers impacted by CrowdStrike disruption
Following the CrowdStrike outage and resulting operational disruption, Delta is continuing to offer several customer-focused options to ease the travel experience and make things right.
STAFF WRITER Jul 26, 2024 9:00pm
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Following the CrowdStrike outage and resulting operational disruption, Delta is continuing to offer several customer-focused options to ease the travel experience and make things right.
Flight Cancellation/Extended Delay Refunds & Trip Cancellation Option
Customers whose travel was disrupted due to a canceled or significantly delayed flight may choose to cancel their travel via Delta.com or the Fly Delta app and receive an automatic refund for the unflown portion of the trip. Since July 19, of the refunds processed, 70% were completed via Delta.com or the app.
No Questions Asked Trip Cancellation
Delta is also permitting customers with travel booked from July 19-28 who chose not to travel to cancel and request a refund of the unflown portion of their trip – regardless of whether their flight was canceled or significantly delayed. Enhanced refund flexibility applies to tickets with Delta-operated flights, purchased on or before July 23.
Out-of-Pocket Expense Reimbursement
We know many customers who experienced a significant delay or flight cancellation incurred unplanned, out-of-pocket expenses during the disruption period, between July 19 and July 28. Delta has expanded the list of eligible expenses that may be covered for this disruption, including flight tickets purchased on other airlines in the same cabin of service or lower, train and bus tickets, rental cars and ride shares.
As part of our Delta Customer Commitment, we will continue to cover reasonable costs for additional categories of expenses.*
How to submit your expenses
Delta’s reimbursement platform on Delta.com provides customers with a seamless way to submit expenses for fast processing.
Visit Delta’s dedicated Temporary Reimbursement Waiver page on Delta.com and click on the Reimbursement Form link to begin the submission process.
Provide your contact and flight information and upload images of your applicable receipts.
Once the form has been submitted, check the status of your submission via the Check Reimbursement Case Status page. Delta has brought in additional Customer Care employees and implemented automated processes to provide customer reimbursements quickly.
Delta’s Customer Care team has implemented several automated processing methods to speed up the reimbursement process and is committed to processing expense reimbursement requests within 30 days, likely sooner.
Automatic Refunds for Bag and Seat Fees
As an added gesture, Delta is automatically refunding all paid checked bag fees for customers who were charged for checking a bag since July 19 (when the disruption started). Delta is continuing to waive bag fees for up to three checked bags for customers traveling through 11:59 p.m. local time July 28.
Additionally, Delta is automatically refunding seat purchases including paid upgrade and preferred seats for customers who were not able to take advantage of those purchases. For example, if a customer paid for a Delta Comfort+ upgrade post purchase and did not travel in that upgraded seat, Delta is automatically refunding the fee.
No action is needed to receive either the baggage or upgrade fee refund; they are being processed automatically over the coming days.
For all ticket or fee refunds, customers will receive the refund back to their original form of payment. Customers may see multiple refund transactions in their credit card or bank statement as fee refunds are processed separately from flight refunds. Customers eligible for out-of-pocket expense reimbursement will receive an email with instructions on how to receive the reimbursement.
Customer Apology Gesture
Customers impacted by a cancellation or significant delay during the disruption period also received an email offering SkyMiles or an electronic Transportation Credit Voucher (ETCV).
Extending a travel waiver
Delta extended a travel waiver for all customers with travel booked from July 19-28. The waiver offers customers the ability to make a one-time change to their itinerary. The fare difference for customers will be waived when rebooked travel occurs on or before Aug. 4, in the same cabin of service as originally booked. Customers are encouraged to manage changes to their travel via delta.com or the Fly Delta app.
@Leonard Scarna
Sure that’s what the page says.
NONE OF IT IS TRUE.
Not only are they denying basic reimbursements (they’ve denied my hotel reimbursement twice now), they’re openly flouting EU law. ALL EU originating delays are due a cash reimbursement of at least 400 euros under EU261, but the page you’re taking about has no way to file that claim. They don’t have a system for it at all. There is literally no way to file that claim.
I’ll likely have to resort to contesting the credit card charge as failure to meet the contract of carriage (which requires compliance with all local laws), because they literally cannot handle claims. The advertised page is a bald faced lie, as are claims of regular reimbursements.
Everyone impacted should file DOT, FAA, and attorney’s general complaints. EU passengers should file complaints in the country of origin. Otherwise they’re going to get away with not paying.
And even then, everyone should probably contest the credit cards charge since it’s unlikely regulatory bodies will handle individual cases.
Good for Delta. They understand that part of taking care of their customers well is taking care of their employees.
Delta hasn’t made good for stranding me. I ultimately had to file a DOT complaint.
These tickets WILL NOT…REPEAT…WILL NOT DISPLACE PAYING PASSENGERS! When booking these positive space passes, they are booked in “K” class only. The employee cannot book this ticket and then cancel the ticket at the last second to “non-rev”. That WILL get the employee’s flight privileges either suspended, revoked or the employee terminated. So, get your information straight before making claims you have no knowledge about
That’s the premium Delta experience right there.
CrowdStrike caused this NOT Delta Airlines.
Delta employees also found themselves turned out during the meltdown. Along with customers employees were being lost in the system and found themselves having to pay for hotels and transportation out of pocket. In addition to having to deal with customers they were left the fend for themselves. So to those saying the employees didn’t deserve the flights that is the very LEAST they deserved. They showed up to work for one thing and ended up being there longer than intended for most, worked into days off, having to pay for childcare etc. in addition to hotels, food, transport to and from airport multiple times a day showing up for flights that were canceled! I don’t think it’s right to assume employees had it easy during this time, they missed important things they were scheduled off for as well: birthdays, funerals, appointment and such…to say they don’t deserve that gesture for a company they work tirelessly for is selfish!
Unfortunately, only Delta mainline got the positive space passes. The DGS/UNIFI poeple that worked just as hard as Delta mainline got nothing. When you are used to working a 40 hour a week and now you’re working over 90 hours , you should be rewarded. They pretend the substations do not exist when there is a crisis. I know that my station took 2 weeks to clean everything up and soothed ruffle feathers that were dealt to flyers.
DL undoubtedly has the worst IT of any mainstream airline. Even NWA over a decade ago had better. DL’s own phone reps complain about it. Instead of blaming everyone for the meltdown that others recovered from much faster, DL need to look internally and specifically at their antiquated IT systems. Hopefully no DL employee in that department got a free pass!
Nobody does worse in IROPS than the Disgrace Of ATL…
But, hey! When we Screw The Pooch Bigtime? Let’s reward the Employees who all got paid and got to go home when they went off shift.
I guarantee there’s STILL thousands of people stranded in Atlanta by these dooctch bags… most of whom went home on Amtrak, a rental car or another airline on their own dime.
Lots of whining and complaining here. Americans take absolutely too much for granted. Re-regulate air traffic if you’re so unhappy.
This article was about the employees who worked hard to restore the system. Not fickle passengers.
I think the point was that everybody was impacted, customers and employees. I saw some Herculean efforts by the employees of Delta at every level. No one wants to see their team, their families and their colleagues go thru what the Delta employees endured that week. I saw people desperately trying to help others.
But I also saw failures and some missed opportunities. The leadership should be on the front line or at least at corporate over seeing the recovery.
The passengers were left hanging and the employees were left with no tools with which to help.
Do better Delta-you absolutely owe a debt to your employees, you let them down too.