Do I get a refund?
 

FC JFK to SEA - TV does not work at my seat. FA tells me she is going to write it up. What does that mean? Do I get a refund, coupon, upgrade, something? Does it happen automatically, or, do I have to call somewhere? Any guidance is appreciated.

"Writing it up" is not for you but the airline. They write a problem ticket (red tag) to get it fixed. You should email DL and they will likely throw you a few miles.

A refund? Are you serious? The flight did get you to your destination right?

Geez - I used the word refund as an example -- nothing more. Calm down

Is an airline obligated to provide you entertainment? did you pay extra for the enternainment?

The airline in question, Delta, marketed a perk to attract fliers to choose them over a competitor. Perhaps the OP paid a premium to fly DL over another carrier with no IFE system to market. In essence, it is possible to pay extra for the entertainment. It's difficult to quantify the exact amount because other marketable features might have played a part in luring the OP's business such as miles, route, and times. I'd say any company that markets a service to the customer is indeed obligate to provide that service. If the service for airlines was JUST "get me from point A to point B" then there would be no FC, no FF programs, no elite tiers, etc.

I can 100% guarantee you that DL will give the OP miles for this. As Evan! says, IFE is a marketing hook and when they tell you it is there it should be there. That said, very difficult to quantify but my guess is a minimum of 5000 miles for the trouble. I have received as much as 25,000 for broken IFE in the past (several times).

Send an email to Delta and let them know. In response, you will get something along the lines of:

"Dear dlfrflyer,

We are sorry to hear that you were disappointed with our service on your flight to Chicago. We know how important tasty and nutritious meals are to your in-flight experience.

We will pass along your comments to the appropriate department and have credited you with 2,500 miles.

dlfrflyer, we hope to have the opportunity to serve you again."

Mike

Airlines these days position premium cabin as a product. Part of the product are the advertised amenities. It is customary for the airlines to throw miles at the customer in these cases. Typically between 1-5k for FC product issues, and 5-25K for J product issues. Depending on severity, class, status and revenue. Though on international flights the purser is often empowered to hand out Millage/ECV certificates on the spot.

Cheney is NO longer in the White House
 

timetosave I recommend a KINDER GENTLER MACHINE GUN HAND

I flew JetBlue BTV-JFK a couple months ago and the satellite TV was broken on the entire flight. The non-live video worked just fine though.

I didn't think anything of it, but I got an email about a week later apologizing for the outage and offering a $15 voucher for future JetBlue flights.

That seemed like fair compensation to me.

I had once a flight (2 years ago) where my the IFE in my seat was in a boot-loop. Made a very long SAN-JFK flight.
worse, the AF connection flight had problems with the sound.
It was a very long trip. I shoot delta an e-mail, but didn't receive anything.
Next time I will be more persistent.

When the AVOD was broken for the entire airplane and the entire flight on my 15 hour LAX-SYD run, they gave everyone, BE and Economy, $100 vouchers upon arrival. As the OP was presumably the only person on the flight having a malfunctioning IFE, they didn't give compensation after his flight.

As a paid FC passenger (remember folks, this is exactly the type customer DL wants to keep) compensation of some kind should definitely be forthcoming.

The OP should remember to keep their letter/email brief and to the point.

I wonder if anyone offered to try and fix it for them.

I'm a Windows/Linux systems administrator, and the people I normally travel with are all embedded firmware engineers.


"15 hours with no AVOD? Bring me a drink, we will fix it!"

Wish you were on that flight. Apparently they had Panasonic engineers working on it, to no avail. The captain apologized and said he was embarrassed as this was DL's newest aircraft.