Delta Thanks “Heroic” Employees With Free Flight Passes

As we all know, Delta faced an absolutely massive meltdown in the past couple of weeks, whereby nearly 7,000 flights were canceled, and even more flights were significantly delayed. While the issue arose due to IT outages with Microsoft and CrowdStrike, ultimately the scale of the meltdown came down to Delta’s crew scheduling software being unable to cope, and breaking down.

Delta has just sent out an interesting note to employees, thanking them for their efforts, and offering them a reward for their efforts throughout the meltdown…

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Ed Bastian’s letter to Delta employees

Delta CEO Ed Bastian sent out a memo to employees, thanking them for their hard work during the meltdown, as flagged by @xJonNYC. As a reward for their efforts, the airline is also offering all Delta employees two positive space tickets to anywhere in the world.

Airline employees of course ordinarily get space available travel, though in this case, Delta employees will be able to plan their travel in advance, thanks to confirmed tickets.

Here’s the memo that Bastian sent out, which I’ll share in its entirety, because I find several of the points to be interesting:

I want to thank all of you for your amazing work over the past two weeks responding to the CrowdStrike outage and its aftermath. I could not be more proud of how our frontline teams managed the crisis and recovery, always focusing on safety and care for our customers in the face of enormous adversity.

Since restoring normal operations more than a week ago, our people have delivered the level on-time performance and completion factor that customers expect from Delta, demonstrating our resilience even in the most trying situations.

We remain focused on taking care of our customers whose travel plans were disrupted, with refunds, reimbursements, miles and travel vouchers among other things.

Nonetheless, this has been a humbling moment for our company. I know it’s been extremely difficult, and I’m deeply sorry for what you have endured. An operational disruption of this length and magnitude is simply unacceptable — you and our customers deserve better.

Your efforts throughout have been nothing short of heroic. That’s why I’m extending my personal thanks to you with two positive space passes to any destination we serve worldwide for eligible Delta employees.

Our IT, operations and customer care teams, who worked around the clock to stabalize our critical systems, are now conducting an intensive analysis of the event. Feedback from leaders and employees who supported our customers also will guide our learnings and future actions. Fundamental to our culture is that we learn our most important lessons from our most trying experiences. We will keep you informed about our findings, which we’ll use to make Delta even stronger in the future.

We have let CrowdStrike and Microsoft know that we are planning to pursue legal claims against them to recover our losses caused by the outage. To assist in that effort, we’ve hired Boies Schiller Flexner, a premier law firm with significant litigation experience.

When you get knocked down, what’s most important is how you get back up. I was reminded of that wisdom many times throughout the CrowdStrike outage, particularly in the hundreds of messages I received directly from our customers praising your efforts to take care of them during the outage.

My deepest thanks and gratitude to every one of you for your dedication to Delta, to our customers and to each order.

My take on Bastian’s letter to Delta employees

I find Bastian’s letter to employees to be interesting on a few levels:

• It’s nice to see Delta finally acknowledging that this was a “humbling moment” for the company, that it’s “simply unacceptable,” and that “you and our customers deserve better,” as that’s about as close to modest and apologetic as we’ll possibly ever see Delta be
• I’m not surprised to see Delta rewarding its employees with something, given that Southwest offered all employees 25,000 Rapid Rewards points when the airline had a meltdown of a similar scale back in late 2022
• I’m sure the meltdown wasn’t fun for Delta employees, but am I the only one who thinks we overuse terms like “heroic?” Like, they didn’t run into a burning building, but they (mostly) showed up to work in line with their contracts
• We already knew Delta plans to sue CrowdStrike and Microsoft, so I’m curious to see how that goes…

Bottom line

Delta has sent a letter to employees, stating that the meltdown was “humbling,” and offering them each two free confirmed tickets for their “heroic” actions during the meltdown.

What do you make of Bastian’s letter to employees?