High Technology

When getting rebooked this weekend at LAX for a cancelled flight, I asked for meal vouchers for my party. I usually don't request these, but we were stuck in LA for over 36 hours and there were 5 of us.

The redcoat that was helping me told me that meal vouchers were no longer going to be issued starting later this month and suggested that I might want to write in to DL to voice my opinion on this.

I don't remember seeing this posted before, so forgive me if I missed it. This isn't a high value benefit to me, though the $30 per person I received at LAX did almost cover lunch and a snack for my family this weekend and took a little of this frustration out of the inability to find us 5 seats LAX-JFK on Saturday or Sunday.

For the DL folks, I assume the meal vouchers, though small, go a long way to calming customers affected by delays so they may have more frustrated customers to contend with if these are eliminated...

rwoman

Were your delays weather-related? If so, do they normally give meal vouchers for WX?

elkapong

They don't normally give meal vouchers for WX.

rwoman

That's what I thought. With the mess hitting much of the US, I cannot help but wonder if the WX caused delays.

xliioper

Yep, I'm guessing OP was on one of the LAX-JFK flights that was cancelled due to the weather in NYC. They may sometimes give out meal vouchers for WX IRROP's, but they are not obligated to do so by the CoC. If it were a mechanical or other issue that is not “force majeure”, and the delay is longer than 4 hours, the CoC still specifies meal vouchers.

fliesdelta

Good to know, thanks for sharing. My son and I traveled to England not long ago, connecting through BOS, and our first flight was delayed by more than an hour due to bad weather at our origin. We missed our BOS-LHR flight, but we were booked on a later flight, and the DL agent (can't remember if it was a red coat) gave us a couple of meal vouchers. I guess we were lucky.

TTT

Could the Red Coat have been referring to the move to the debit card instead of the meal voucher?

OHDL1

No...he/she wasn't....

arkangel

Since the OP is apparently a DL PLT, that may have had to do with the voucher issuance for the WX than anything else. Seems it's an unwritten benefit for PLTs with WX IRROP. Maybe that's what's going away soon.

javabytes

Always seemed to be a discretionary thing. Sometimes you'd get it and sometimes you wouldn't. Wouldn't be surprised to see them take it away and reserve it for 360s and maybe DMs.

davetravels

almost

Seriously??? You couldn't get lunch for less than $30 PP???

javabytes

LAX is expensive. Even the McDonalds is like ten bucks for a meal. And if you want something moderately edible, Skewers or Lemonade easily push double that for a fairly standard meal. That said, $30 pp should have more than adequately covered a meal.

High Technology

Sorry, the lunch and snack were separate meals -- I wasn't clear in differentiating them as this weekend is a little fuzzy: I left Sydney on Saturday at noon Australian Time (equivalent to 8:00PM Friday night on the East Coast), and got back home in the NYC suburbs at 7:00PM Eastern on Monday night. Regarding the way I used the vouchers:

Since we were outside of security due to our cancellation coming from an international redeye flight, the only food I know of is the Starbucks in the AA terminal (T4 at LAX). A sandwich or salad is nearly $10, then you tack on a drink and tax and I think we were just over $70 for the 5 of us for Saturday's lunch (I used $70 of vouchers and paid a few bucks in cash).

Since we were delayed essentially two days (but only got meal vouchers for one day's worth at $10 per person x 3 meals), we used the remaining vouchers for a snack at the Westin down the road since we had a few hours to kill between when our rental car was due back and checking in for the redeye on Sunday night, and we didn't want to sit in the SkyClub. For 5 people we ordered 3 appetizers and 2 desserts from the bar menu (not exactly a meal for 5, but we had lunch at 3:30 on Sunday so we weren't starving) . That took care of the remaining $80 (actually the bill was $103 before tip, but that included my 2 beers and a cocktail for the Mrs.). I know hotel prices are high, but these prices aren't really out of line from what you'd see at an airport and I like the Westin's bar food choices (which are from Daily Grill).

I wasn't trying to stretch the vouchers to cover all of our expenses -- I know you could probably eat for $10/meal if you needed to. I paid for Dinner on Saturday which was about $100 at a small Mexican place and we had lunch on Sunday out-and-about which was about $60 in cash. I also rented a car and took the kids to the Santa Monica Pier on Sunday since it was my little one's 9th birthday and she was upset that she wasn't going to make it home for her birthday after being away for 2 weeks. So even though DL provided the meal/hotel vouchers, it cost me close to $300 out of pocket. Note: I am not complaining about the cost -- my view is that when life gives you lemons, you either make lemonade or a cocktail out of them...


Back to the original topic: The way the red coat seemed to be explaining it was that meal vouchers were going away, period. Perhaps they were referring to the debit card feature (which I admittedly forgot about), but they certainly didn't say that they were replacing meal vouchers with a debit card system, rather they said that they will no longer issue meal vouchers starting later this month and that I might want to write in. Does the debit system start later this month?

xliioper

Once again, meal vouchers are a part of the CoC (Contract of Carriage) which is available on the Delta website. However, they are not required to give them out for force majeure events like weather which was likely the reason for your delay. This is covered in the CoC. Either you misunderstood the red coat, or she is wrong.

javabytes

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