I agree that during a weather situation like the current one, with JFK and ATL flight affected, DL should have longer wait times than usual.

Unfortunately, for me, "usual" with DL has been 35+ minutes. These calls were not made during storm events (I was amazed at the wait times and checked to see what was up, but nothing stood out).

In my opinion, here's what DL needs to do to fix the issues with Res. hold times:

1) Make the website such that you don't have to call DL for everything. Right now, there are many things that can not efficiently be done online that require you to call into DL (including booking international award tickets apparently). Just because the feature is available on your website, does not mean that it works well!
2) Adequately staff the elite call centers. After getting through to an agent following 40+ minutes of hold time, she actually confessed to me (this was a former NW agent in the SEA call center) that the call centers were woefully under-staffed due to "retraining". That's poor management, in my opinion. Even during extreme weather situations, you should be able to at least answer the elite line, even if that's followed by an extended wait time. Apparently that wasn't the case during this storm. Several people reported getting the "system overload" fast busy signal when calling the platinum line...Just shouldn't happen!
3) Empower your agents to take care of the issues themselves, instead of requiring customers to be transferred back and forth between several departments. The current system may look good on paper because no individual agent spends more than 5-10 minutes with one customer, but in reality, that customer spends 20 minutes talking to four different agents, and 20 minutes on hold...again, not acceptable!