Originally Posted by wentona777

So I am a Delta GM (and have been for a few years), and primarily travel on Delta whenever possible. A recent experience, however, has gotten me thinking about whether or not they really do care about their "best" customers...

I was on Delta's JFK-MXP flight last week, and my friend and I boarded the flight (scheduled for an 810pm departure) just before 8pm and took our seats. We were informed that we were number 17 for deicing and would have a delay of ~45 minutes. Totally understandable, as it had been snowing for most of the day in NYC. But that delay kept getting longer, and we eventually sat at the gate for just about 4 hours before pushing back (it was long enough that we watched the entire Harry Potter movie and were served dinner at the gate). Once away from the gate, we only had about an hour worth of waiting to get deiced and finally depart JFK. We took off just after 1am.

Near the end of the delay, we were told that we lost our de-icing slot because other airlines (CSA was mentioned) had to go first or their crews would go illegal (I guess because we only had a 7-hour flight ahead of us, this wasn't an issue). Now it seems to me to be a "it's not my problem" situation for Delta, considering that they had to delay their own flights to de-ice others. Maybe I'm wrong, but once Delta caught wind of this, I figured they'd at least let us get off the aircraft -- sitting on board a 763 for ~12 hours for a 7 hour flight (6:50 on that night) is a bit ridiculous. The only apology I got was when the flight attendants handed back my medallion drink coupons at the end of the flight...

I wrote to Delta customer service and got the standard "it was due to weather and your own safety" reply. I'm not necessarily looking for Delta to jump through hoops and bounds for me, but doesn't it seem that a bit more of an apology is due in a situation like this?