Originally Posted by
mattp1987
It does a lot of good IMO. If the flight still goes 12 hours late, you at least get to your destination (or at the very least to a hub). That's a lot better than having all the passengers on the flight scramble to grab the limited number of seats for the next day's flight(s) that haven't sold yet.
I recently had a 4.5 hour delay on a DL flight to ATL. I missed my connection that night, but I got home on the first flight the next morning. Some passengers did choose to just get rebooked the next morning, but 1) the seats on the morning flights to ATL/DTW/MSP got snapped up quickly, and 2)most people who had to connect wouldn't get in until early afternoon at best. I was glad the flight went in order to minimize delays. This particular flight was from a domestic location with flights to 6 cities that are all at least focus cities, but the cancellation vs delay value proposition would become even more drastic if we were talking about a destination with only once- or twice-daily service (e.g., many international locations that aren't partner hubs or cities like ELP that see 2x daily flights to ATL and nothing else).
^^
Another thing I've noticed about DL is that they're *usually* pretty good about delaying in chunks and delaying early. Obviously there are situations where they don't delay until the last minute and they tell people to wait around by the gate because they don't know when they'll be able to board, but often they've preemptively delayed by an hour or more, which makes it easy to hang out in the sky club and get work done. It's come to my aid twice this year, when I've been able to rebook to an earlier flight due to an early delay notification.
Every time I've experienced a delay on United (so most times I've flown United...), they don't delay until the last minute, and they delay it by about ten minutes at a time over and over again. It's so frustrating.