Originally Posted by
KDCAflyer
To be clear, I'm not enjoying having to defend Delta here. But people demanding compensation don't have grounds in this case IMO. Delta may issue it out of goodwill, but there is no obligation. I don't even really see refund requests based on this to be valid.
If you truly wanted to guarantee an empty seat next to you, buy one. Delta has that option.
Disagree here. They've not been quiet about advertising middle seat free and as someone pointed out, they don't appear to have any weasel asterisk that get them off the hook here. It's an unintentional bait & switch - but that's what it is, I could quite easily see a Small Claims Court siding with the passenger here because this snafu is on Delta entirely, they booked more business than they could handle. On that basis, I think anyone impacted is entitled to something of a refund. If you took the flight anyway, then I'd struggle with the refund being 100%, but certainly a modicum of comp would be warranted.
As I said, the cost of comps/refunds from pissed off pax is definitely < than the cost of putting up the canceled folks in a hotel, which is why they've done it.