Delta Focuses On Brand, Not Passengers, During Outage

@Alpha Their cookies are delicious. And: 1. They've stopped serving them on some flights. My recent DL <700 mile trips have not featured them! 2. One can buy them w/o the Delta branding in fairly large quantities at the giant-box membership stores. So I now recommend that we all book whatever airline has the best combination of fare & schedule, and cater our own cookies in flight!

@ Todd Lest anyone think I'm making up the "Delta flies only one passenger stories", here are multiple examples: From 2016: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/man-is-the-only-passenger-on-a-160-seater-delta-flight-a7107571.html From 2015: http://www.cnn.com/2015/01/13/travel/man-alone-delta-flight-feat/ From 2014: The "big data" lie that gave rise to all this DL game-playing http://www.pbs.org/newshour/making-sense/how-delta-masters-the-game-of-overbooking-flights/

@Todd-- I have to believe part of it tracks back to 'culture'.... DL's PR team basically manufactured the "We never cancel flights" thing. And the whole company apparently bought into their own Bull Excrement. They insisted they "never cancel flights" (Although I giggled the last time I was in HNL and the board listed a DL flight as "still at the gate" after a 22 hour 'delay'. I think to the passengers, whole likely all bailed for other flights, that after 12 hours of sitting there, well it's as good as a cancellation...) even though they'd canceled thousands in 2016, even before last week*** That's why they terminated the Interline Agreement with AA-- DL was convinced they were being used. Wonder if they think that this week? DL continued to insist their 'ontime percentage' was 10 points higher than the others... I believe this is also manufactured. The last time DL stranded me at BWI, I had extra time to check the "ontime" rating for all the alternatives onward legs to MSP and DTW. DL's site insisted they were all 90-100% ontime. FlightStats and FlightAware both showed them between 60-70%. So, yeah, I would NOT stake my life on ANYTHING Delta says. They, though, appeared to think they were invincible and burned a lot of lifelines that could have prevented or ameliorated some of the pain last week. Including a full back-up contingency program. Tachyon *** This reminds me, anyone else ever marvel at the series of "A Delta Passenger shows up for his flight and finds he is the only passenger?" stories on cable news? I think, in the context of the DL PR line "We never cancel flights", this makes total sense-- most sane passengers bail on these really late DL "non-canceled cancellations", so DL gets more than their share of "Gee only one passenger on a big jet" stories. It's more than an oddity-- it's the way DL manipulates their stats to 'look better' even when it's worse for the Pax.

@DSA I'm really sorry. That is appalling. Whether you were "F" or "E" class ticketed, that sort of behavior is simply intolerable. And, it does raise the question for me: If the denied boarding compensation statute kicks in when, through over-optimism, DL sells 185 seats for a 175 seat plane and you aren't able to get where you paid to go in the timeframe you intended to get there.... why doesn't the same thing apply when, through over-optimism by DL's IT/systems guy, a single-point-failure grounds the fleet and you aren't able to get where you paid to go in the timeframe you intended to get there? Personally, with the sheer number of times DL has delayed me over 5 hours (and in many cases overnight) in last 24 months, I'd have several thousand dollars worth of EU-style compensation (plus hotel and meals, of course). I just don't understand how a few people will get $200 "vouchers" on this one incident-- and somehow that makes a half-million passengers whole??? It doesn't compute for me. "Delta screws up? Delta Pays Up..." should be the guiding principle. Hopefully a few Senators/Representatives got tied up in the mess this time and the Congress will finally take up legislation to put us on equal footing with the EU regulations.

Tangential but a little off topic: As an IT executive of a very large international company, I've been following this issue with Delta quite closely. If nothing else, it highlights what many companies fear going through. You asked the question: “How can the world’s second largest airline be reliant on a single piece of technology?” Though I don't know Delta's situation specifically, I can tell you I've been at many large companies who could have been in this same situation because they choose not to make investments in backup technology. There's a risk-reward for making sizable investments that are mostly insurance policies against large outages. Many companies don't want to spend the millions of dollars on this equipment or staff, and even if you do make the investment, you actually need to run a "disaster recovery" test at least once a year to see if your technology, process and people are ready to handle things. Almost every company out there relies heavily on technology today - this blog being a great example. You hope that nothing catastrophic happens, but it will. It's only a matter of time. I tell people all the time there are three guarantees in life: death, taxes and your technology will fail. It just depends on how bad the failure will be, how quickly you can restore services and business to normal, and how much it will cost you in lost revenue and brand. Again, I don't know Delta's specific situation, but surely they would have paid far less in more investment in technology, people and process versus the fallout of what they're going through now. Until the next major outage...