What do you guys think should happen here? How is an agent supposed to know whether someone is "high enough" up the priority chart to go ahead and confirm their seat? The agent is dealing with a pax who had a confirmed seat. If there's J on the flight he's asking about, then he should get it.
Are you expecting the agent to go through the whole manifest of the cancelled flight and examine every passenger to see if they're "better" than the one the agent is currently dealing with? And should the agent contact all of those pax and find out if they want to be re-routed on the flight the passenger is asking about??? It's absolutely insane. It's IRROPs, sometimes .... happens.
Exactly.
The thing was, time was of the essence.
The disrupted flight was the last nonstop to ATL for the day. The offloaded passengers from the flight were waiting for bags when I made the call around 3:45p London time. The flight to JFK was leaving at 5:30p.
To make that flight, a passenger would have to pick up the bag, clear customs, head back to the counter to check in again, clear security again, and make it to the gate. It was doable, but there was not time for Delta to do an analysis of which customer was highest in the pecking order, contact that customer, make sure a flight to JFK instead of a flight to ATL was OK, and make sure the customer got to that flight.
Given the time constraints, I did not want to HUCA since the agent had escalated it to the supervisor level. I pressed the issue and ultimately won the battle. Frankly, otherwise that LHR-JFK seat probably goes out empty because I don't think anyone else was going to act so quickly.
But, bottom line, it was IROPS and in that situation, upgraded or not, there was no "rule" preventing the agent from grabbing that last seat, and certainly no reason to have attitude.
By the way, the passenger in question is based in London and does buy full J for some trips and when buying coach books in Y or B. He buys paid-First on domestic US flights. A look at his profile, and the secret scores attached to it, would have yielded a favorable picture to the airline IMO. Yet, I get lectured by the agent like I am trying to steal a seat for him and break some other rule by having him overnight at JFK, which he did at his own expense.