Compensation for 36 hour delay in D1 ATL-EZE?
I was traveling to EZE in early this month and had booked the D1 suites on A330-900neo JFK-EZE. Unfortunately my connecting flight to JFK was delayed then cancelled (actually tried to book a last minute ticket to EWR on UA to make the flight, but that also got cancelled), so we were rebooked via ATL on DL101 ATL-EZE the next day.
This is where things get interesting. The ATL-EZE flight was first delayed 2 hours due to a missing FO (reserve pilot apparently lived 2 hours away and had to drive to ATL). We boarded 2 hours late at 11:30pm, pushed back and sat on the taxiway for a good 30 minutes. They then announced that the only runway that could accommodate our weight was closed (I'm guessing 27R), despite the ATL-ICN flight having just taken off 30 minutes prior on 27R. This led to another 12 hour delay with lyft/hotel vouchers and rescheduled DL 101 at 11:30AM. We were ~35 hours late getting into Buenos Aires and actually had to scrap a whole side trip to Patagonia (the airport we were flying into was shutting down a few days later and it didn't make sense to fly there for <48 hours).
While I get that weather delays, sick pilots, etc can't be anticipated, it seems odd that a reserve pilot would be 2 hours away at such a major hub (ATL) and that Delta operations didn't anticipate which runway was needed/planned to have it open before boarding/pushing back from the gate. If the reserve pilot had arrived 30 minutes earlier, or perhaps if operations had reached out to ATL ground ops letting them know they'd need this runway, we could've still salvaged most of this trip. I actually listened to the LiveATC recordings and apparently they looked into reopening 27R for us before the original pilots timed out, but there was already too much work underway.
We were offered 20k miles for the delay proactively, though wondering if that seems appropriate. Also wondering if anyone has had experience getting a partial refund or reimbursements (tickets were ~$4K one way in refundable D1 and our connecting flights scheduled for ~24 hours after our original scheduled arrival were about ~$900).