About 500,000 passengers found themselves stranded by Delta Air Lines last week due to a major service meltdown.
Some people had to sleep on airport floors as a result, while many others were simply left angry and frustrated that they weren’t able to take off, figure out where their bags were or even get a clear answer about when everything would be fixed by the airline.
Unfortunately, for many of these passengers, they will have little choice but to fly on Delta again in the future — some because they have racked up millions of frequent flier miles and some because there isn’t another option based on where they’re flying into and out of.
That’s just the way the airline system in America is nowadays. The four largest airline companies in the U.S. control in excess of 70% of all air travel in the country. In addition to Delta, that group includes Southwest, United and American.
People who live near an airport where one of those airlines has a hub rarely have much of a choice in which company they want to fly with — unless they are OK with multiple stops or are flying to only very specific destinations.
Delta’s hubs are in Salt Lake City, Minneapolis, Detroit and Atlanta.
CNN published a story about this situation recently, speaking to many people who were affected by the service meltdown that Delta experienced. One of those people was Don Hooper, who has built more than 1 million frequent flier miles with Delta by flying at least once per week when he was a full-time banker in the Atlanta region.
Now that he’s semi-retired, Hooper takes at least eight trips every year with his wife Dorothy, and they of course fly Delta because they can do so for free.
The couple was taking a trip to Glacier National Park and attending a wedding in Montana when Delta experienced the meltdown last week. They were trying to head home, but ended up being stranded in Salt Lake City for three days.
In order to get home, the couple had to pay for their own trip on a budget airline carrier, Spirit, just so they could get home early in the morning on Wednesday.
As Hooper said in an interview with CNN:
“I wouldn’t say I’m angry. I’m disappointed. We were never communicated with, were never contacted. We were left on our own. They left people to fend for themselves with no assistance.”
Computer programs that affected millions of PCs across the world were the culprit of the Delta outage. In fact, more than 5,000 flights were canceled last Friday alone, and Delta wasn’t the only carrier that was affected.
But, Delta’s outage continued well beyond when most of the other airlines were already running at normal capacity.
FlightAware, an online tracking service, reported that Delta ended up canceling more than 4,400 flights between July 19 and July 21. It then canceled another 1,800 flights on Monday and Tuesday.
While Delta says it’s fully back up and running now, many passengers still have a very bad taste in their mouth from the experience. Unfortunately for a majority of them, they won’t have a choice to switch to another air carrier in response to their poor experience.