Bad Delta, bad
I'll try to make this brief, although as Mark Twain once said, "I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one".
I love Delta, usually, but they did a very bad thing to me a couple of weeks ago.
I was supposed to fly from Minneapolis to Boston at 8:30 AM on Monday, July 30, with the wife and three kids. We were to go through Atlanta and get in around 6PM. Remember, my kids are 5, 3 and 18 months.
I called Delta Sunday to see if there were open flights to fly more direct. I was told that I could be on a 7:30AM through Cincinnati and get in around noon. I had to call three hours before, so around 4:30 in the morning, to confirm. I decided to get up at 3 in the morning to get my fam and all of our crap to the airport.
Sunday night I tried to call Delta but no luck, the phone was busy. I wanted to see if the earlier flight was still open. I was on hold twice, once for 45 minutes, the other for over an hour, before giving up.
Around 10:30 I noticed a missed call on my cell phone from an 800 number. I called the number back and it was Delta, but I couldn’t get through. No message was left on my cell from Delta.
Around 11PM Sunday night I checked the status of my flight and it showed that I was now on a 5:30AM flight, meaning I had to get myself up at 2:30AM, and the kids and wife out by 3:00AM.
Around 11:15 I got an email from Delta that my flight was cancelled and that I was rebooked on TUESDAY at 5:30AM, a little detail I overlooked 15 minutes earlier. So instead of going home at 8:30 on Monday, I was going home on Tuesday. A day later. Ugh.
Since I had to fly to San Fran from Boston at 7AM on Tuesday for work, and my new flight was going to get us in at 1PM, I had an issue. I was going to miss my work related flight. Plus, Ethan had to be home on Tuesday morning for his last day of a school he had been going to for the past year. They were going to have a party for him. Plus we all wanted to get home.
I tried to call Delta starting at 11:16 but was on hold for hours, never got through.
I woke up at 2AM, took a shower and got dressed, packed the car up, finally go through to Delta at 3AM.
Since there were 5 of us traveling, and I didn’t have expensive business tickets, I got the low end of the stick. Nothing they could do other than move my flight to San Fran to later that night on Tuesday. So instead of getting in to California at 3 in the afternoon, I was getting in at 3 in the morning. Great. And they did not do a thing to get us out on Monday and told me I was out of luck. The phone customer service person could have cared less about me, she was a jerk on the phone. She told me to NOT head to the airport because I would not get home. So I went back to sleep around 4 and woke up at 6 with the kids.
Delta did not apologize, or offer any compensation, since the plane could not get out of Atlanta on Sunday due to weather. Since weather delay, they do not compensate, or say sorry, and the passenger has no rights at all. It’s incredible that they, or any airline, can use that excuse. So there was rain in Atlanta and I got stuck with an extra day on the rental, possibly a hotel bill, missed my business meeting, and could have spent the day at the airport. Delta was wrong here I hate to admit.
Thanks Delta for looking out for us Platinum members. When I travel for work, you care about me because I have an expensive ticket. But when I fly with my family on a cheaper ticket, I am just another criminal to Delta that they can treat as they wish. To take things to the extreme, Delta could have pushed me and my family off for a week before flying us home. In fact, I think if the flights were all full, they would have pushed us back until Wed or Thu. Most any industry has a governing body to regulate how customers are treated, and regulation mandated by the government on rights. But the airlines can do whatever they want and we are stuck. It’s just not right.
To make it worse, we had to split up on one of our flights home on Tuesday. Patti and the baby near the middle, me and the two older kids in the last row. AND I had to buy a headset so my kids could watch a movie. I usually love Delta but this time they messed up.