delta air lines

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Where Was Ed? Delta CEO Fled To Europe During Airline Meltdown

by Gary Leff

Jul 24 2024

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.

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Green Shoots: Passengers Won’t Notice It Today, But Internally Delta May Have Turned A Corner To Fix Its Mess

by Gary Leff

Jul 23 2024

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.

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Delta Air Lines Meltdown: Getting Worse Before It Gets Better As New Systems Crash

by Gary Leff

Jul 23 2024

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.

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Delta’s Total Collapse: Hundreds Of Thousands Stranded, Unable To Even Talk To The Airline, While Others Recover

by Gary Leff

Jul 21 2024

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.

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Delta Air Lines Confirms Plan To “Unbundle” Business Class: Pay For Only What You Need

by Gary Leff

first class seats
Jul 12 2024

Delta Air Lines confirmed during its second quarter earnings call a plan for ‘basic business.’ Just like they have ‘unbundled’ economy class, offering basic economy that doesn’t allow changes or mileage-earning and where you don’t get to pick your own seat, they view ‘unbundling’ of the features of business class a new step in maximizing revenue from customers.

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Delta Discovers It’s Just Another Airline, Blames Rivals for Profit Drop

by Gary Leff

Jul 12 2024

Delta Air Lines is earning half the industry’s profit. They had a 13.6% operating margin and made $1.3 billion in the last quarter. That’s great – except that both figures are down year-over-year and the airline lowered its guidance for the third quarter as well. Their stock lost 8% of its value at the open on Thursday’s morning’s announcement, though it gained half of that back by the end of the trading day.

The airline’s spin is that there’s too much capacity, and the problem is other airlines, but the industry is correcting itself. In other words, the problem isn’t Delta, and going forward Delta won’t have a problem. I don’t think this actually makes sense.

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