Tag Archives for delta air lines.
One man suffering at the hands of Delta’s thousands of cancelled flights this past week decided to take revenge in the only way he knew how. Stuck in the airport, the Sky Club lounge member found himself out expenses for a trip he was no longer getting to fully take and without compensation for those expenses. So he decided to take compensation, or at least impose costs on the airline, equal to what he was incurring.
Delta Air Lines is getting approbation for its about-face, finally now being willing reimburse customers who had to buy airline tickets on other carriers while they’ve cancelled well over 5,000 flights the past few days.
The most dangerous place in Atlanta is usually between Delta CEO Ed Bastian and any tv camera. But he wasn’t giving interviews. He wasn’t out talking to employees or customers. He wasn’t even taking responsibility for the mess – days after all the other airlines recovered from the CrowdStrike outage, he was blaming CrowdStrike and not his own carrier’s IT mess that followed, that their own staff couldn’t recover from.
Instead he left the country while passengers were still stranded and employees struggled to get things moving again.
The airline is out with another statement from the CEO and it’s appalling. All other airlines were up and running quickly after the CrowdStrike outage. He still accepts zero responsibility. That shouldn’t be surprising.
Delta Air Lines may be starting to turn a corner with their internal operations finally, after melting down on Friday, cancelling thousands of flights (nearly 3 times as many as in all of 2019 and more cancellations than in all of 2018 and 2019 combined), and displacing hundreds of thousands of passengers.
Passengers won’t notice it today but the pieces are beginning to come into place to get to a better place.
Monday was supposed to be better for Delta than Sunday – and it was, just cancelled ‘only’ 1,153 flights or 29% of their operation, and delayed another 45% more. On Sunday it was 36% canceled and 44% delayed.
There’s no end in sight because even before 6 a.m. Tuesday they’ve already cancelled over 10% of the day’s flights. They have planes out of position for maintenance – perhaps as many as 40% of their aircraft – and they still don’t know where their crews are and can’t get them assigned to flights.
It is clear that you do not want to be a Delta customer even today, which hopefully will be better than the past three days. As of 6 a.m. Eastern the carrier has ‘only’ scrubbed 15% of its flights while American is at 1% and United 0%.
Delta is a good airline that is not doing very well right now. But it’s also an overrated airline, a result of its own PR machine that persistently beats the drum about how premium it is despite workhorse Boeing 767s whose premium passenger experience lags that of both American and United. This is a strong reminder that though it performs marginally better much of the time, and its crews are marginally friendlier, it’s still an airline and can underperform peers in dramatic ways.
After a crazy lobbying process, Delta Air Lines achieved a partial success is getting the federal government to approve new ‘beyond perimeter’ slots at Washington’s National Airport.
Now there’s jockeying over which airlines will get the slots, and Delta is pushing to keep one out of the hands of American Airlines.
A passenger reviewing the Delta One Lounge at New York JFK shared her experience on the ground, and up in the air, as much from the perspective of her pooch as from a passenger. Her dog loved the new business class-only space, including the food, showing the pet dining and eating various courses from the table.
Gary Leff is one of the foremost experts in the field of miles, points, and frequent business travel -- a topic he has covered since 2002.
Co-founder of frequent flyer community InsideFlyer.com, emcee of the Freddie Awards, and named one of the "World's Top Travel Experts" by Conde' Nast Traveler (2010-Present) Gary has been a guest on most major news media, profiled in several top print publications, and published broadly on the topic of consumer loyalty. More About Gary »
