omaralt

here we go again; delta edition



seems that they had a ticket for their older son, who then took an earlier flight. he felt entitled to use it for his lap child.. he's definitely in the wrong, but the FA who said "you and your wife will be in jail and your kids will be in foster care" needs a few lessons in customer service..

HomerJay

The first FA needs to be fired. Period. Saying, "you will be arrested and your kids will be taken away from you," is so far beyond the pale, there's no excuse at all.

After what has happened over the past month, her lack of self-awareness is mind-boggling.

On the positive side, at least they didn't assault and bloody the lap child.

Beckles

But Good Morning America said they paid for the seat for their child!

omaralt

they did pay for that seat; but for the older child.


now i completely understand that you cant just change passengers on a seat. however, how did it get to the point of them being threatened with jail and foster care??

HomerJay

So this family bought a seat for their 18-year old on this flight, then bought him ANOTHER seat on an earlier flight so that they could use his seat on THIS flight for their infant? Well, that's probably not acceptable according to the small print of the CoC and Delta policy, but common sense and common decency and family values should prevail. It's the family's seat. We're talking about an infant sleeping on a redeye.

Jeez. How tone deaf can you be????

omaralt

exactly. they are probably not frequent fliers. They assumed that since they paid for this seat they can use it for their lap child. it's not like they're bringing some random person into this seat. they're simply using it for somebody who has already been cleared for this flight. However, it's important that the airline knows who's on this flight. They need to know that the older child is not on this flight and that it's being used for their lap child. however, airlines seem to lack common sense. hopefully this spate of big stories will make airlines re-evaluate their policies.

FlyerWx

Do I understand it correctly that they did not cancel the ticket for their older child, but expected it to remain empty?

Because I thought the other child would count as a no-show and DL could give the seat to an overbooked pax...

MSPeconomist

If the flight was full, it could have cost DL now up to $10,000 to do a VDB for the seat that the lap infant occupied. If the flight wasn't full, people with lap kids can use otherwise unoccupied seats for the kid for free.

I wonder whether the older son's boarding pass actually boarded the flight or not. It might have been easy to just use it for the lap kid and probably the DL FAs and GAs wouldn't have noticed unless their software had already caught the duplicate booking and canceled one or both flights for the older kid.

ADDED: Attempted theft of services.

gooselee

The guy is technically wrong, but the FA does a horrible job explaining it and starts making up way too many (completely false) excuses that she can't then dig herself out of.

Now some genius Congress is going to get some hairbrained idea that all airline tickets must be fully transferable and refundable at all times, combined with no overbooking. That sounds wonderful up until you realize who will end up paying for that new setup...

Credit where it's due, the guy kept pretty calm and collected in what was certainly a tough situation for him and his family, and relatively quickly made choices to take care of them in the moment and then deal with DL's decisions later.

gooselee

Some other story I read last night said that the guy explained what he was doing to the GAs before boarding and they didn't seem to have a problem with it (a big mistake by the DL GA, if true). So on the one hand, he was breaking the rules. On the other hand, he may have thought he asked a DL employee if it was okay and got a green light.

Isn't the FT mantra to ask nicely for the exception but don't fight it if you're told no? In this case, the guy may have asked and was told yes, which only exacerbated the situation after they boarded and then DL changed their minds.

ETA: The fact that the guy asked puts the GA in a tough spot, too. Now that the GA *knows* the ticketed pax is not present, they cannot scan the BP and show someone on the manifest who they know isn't actually there. Later, the system will show an empty seat due to a no-show, and I imagine GA will be questioned if they dispatch a flight with empty seats but pax on the standby list. It is not the GA's job to reissue tix for different passengers just because they've decided they want to swap out the people on their PNR.

GUWonder

It sounds like the family messed up in one more ways and that DL made the matter worse.

If the family knew what it was doing when checking in and boarding, it could have probably avoided or otherwise better managed the issue -- whether or not they would have ended up as VDB or IDB passengers.

It seems like airlines can't help but think that law enforcement officers and the government should act as an agent of the airline in matters of contractual dispute. Apparently DL didn't get the UA memo.

kchoya

It's not like the kid had a driver's license. They should have just said, yes, this is the named passenger who paid for that seat.

Often1

A whole lot of speculation in this thread. If any of those posting the "facts" above saw what happened or spoke with someone reliable about it, great. Otherwise, it's just more fake news here on FT.

1. As a general matter, if there is space available, lap kids are fine in a spare seat so long as properly secured. Even more the case on domestic flights where there is no charge for the lap kid. This likely only came to anyone's attention because someone showed up with a BP for the lap kid's seat and that only occurs when the older kit has been offloaded because he no showed.

2. If the family did use the older son's BP for the lap kid, the GA has no real way of verifying because there is no ID check on infants (or anyone <16). Perhaps the GA should have double-checked that the BP was for an infant, but that holds up the boarding process. This of course ultimately throws of weight & balance calculations and that gets the Captain and dispatcher involved as the entire process gets reset. I have no idea what else was assigned in that TPAC region at the time, but if the aircraft misses its slot (it's all by radio and assigned time slot because there's no radar over the Pacific), it holds until the next slot opens.

3. As to whether DL ought to simply reassign tickets on the fly, that's not something GA's can do. There's a ton of sad stories out there. Where would you draw the line?

- Bought your girlfriend a ticket and she died, so now you want to transfer the cheap ticket to someone else rather than buy a new expensive one?
- Friend got sick at the last minute and can't travel?


So, really need lots and lots of facts here.

People still talk about Stella Liebeck and the $3 Million she collected off a well-known fast food chain for the disintegrating cup of coffee.

omaralt

these are the facts:

ticket was for older son.
older son took an earlier flight
they had a lap child with them
they tried to use the older sons seat for their lap child
they were taken off the plane

those are the facts. now we can speculate about the circumstances and what not. this is a forum after all for flying matters

now to answer your question about where to draw the line. i think the airlines need to give the GA some discretion to use common sense. No, you cannot bring a random person instead of the person who was going to use the seat. but they should be able to replace the older childs name with the lap child. both have been cleared for the flight. if somebody's wife/gf died, thats a different story. the airlines should ask for a death certificate and simply refund the fare.

GUWonder

Discussion and speculation are not one and the same thing. And calling discussion -- and even included speculation -- "fake news" is just amusing commentary that makes no point in this case other than to be part of a smoke and mirrors campaign.

A 2-year-old child is not entitled to be a lap-child on DL, and such child is required to have a ticketed seat on the flight. A child even younger than two years of age may have a ticketed seat. That isn't fake news.

Unlike with fake news, there is recorded evidence of this actual incident.