Originally Posted by
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.
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.