Originally Posted by
WhiskeyBravo
My personal experience: Delta doesn't publish delayed flight times unless they are sure. I've never seen a DL flight which had a _published_ delay leave early. They do this exactly because of your situation -- people see the first delay message, then decide to arrive for the new departure time.
Flew SAN LAX AUS a couple of weeks ago. While on the hotel shuttle to SAN, we got a message stating our LAX-AUS was delayed 3 hours. However, when we got to SAN and checked in ~10 minutes later the flight was still on time. I even had numerous reroute options provided on on the DL app. We knew it was better to go to the airport and handle changes from that point.
Got to LAX? On time. In the end we arrived into AUS about 15 minutes early.