All of that is great until you look at time to implement. What you're talking about could take many years to get to production, based on the legacy systems. I've had the advantage in my professional career to work mostly in the ecommerce world - we aren't dealing with any 15+ year old systems because the system/need didn't exist 15 years ago.

I think it's more than fair to feel like whatever happened is unacceptable (and it is very unacceptable in this day and age), yet at the same time understand the position they are in. The bottom line is whatever happened is preventable, given time and money. Every decision to build redundancy in their systems isn't free, and they have to weigh the cost vs. benefit. Obviously a day after a major incident, the natural inclination is to spend every dime of profit to make sure this never happens again, but I guarantee you that setiment will change in some people's minds on Virginia Ave in three years, assuming they don't have another major, public incident. It's natural and is in many cases, human nature. I've been turned down for money multiple times to make systems more redundant and it was really frustrating. In some cases, the exact component I want to harden failed, and in some cases, the component I wanted to harden never failed, and there were a couple times where something I didn't think of failed. Bottom line it was my responsibity to ensure uptime.

In terms of why they haven't issued a statement, what would you like them to say, and how would it change anything? I think as a customer, it's quite clear this isn't weather, terrorism, ATC, or other act of god. Further, as a customer, it's not my job to care exactly what happened. Are they really going to promise it will never happen again? They can't guarantee that.

I have my opinions working in the industry I do, but the main reason I've been on this thread since yesterday morning is because I'm flying tomorrow and I'm hoping I get where I need to get (DFW) some semblance of on time.

From other posts, hotels in the ATL area were fully booked so its likely DL couldn't offer anything even if they tried by that point.

Given the number of hotels in Atlanta -- and I do not have any metrics to corroborate my view -- I struggle to believe that. More likely: many hotels did not have dozens of vacant rooms available and logistics of ferrying people to and from those places are something that DL did not want to bother with.

Yeah, I bet the remaining capacity got booked in those airport area hotels pretty fast at full freight (or points where applicable). The nanosecond I find out I am not going anywhere that evening I am going to be trying to procure a room.

I've lost a lot of respect for Delta over the last couple of days. My flights yesterday went fine, but my 18-y.o. daughter is still stranded in ATL. Last night at 2:00a, after 10 hours of delays and I've lost count of how many flight cancellations, the Diamond desk was saying that the earliest they could get her into her destination airport is Wednesday. Meanwhile, pax in her shoes are left to fend for themselves for two nights at the ATL airport with no food vouchers, hotels, showers, etc. etc. Delta's response is "there are 30,000 people stranded there so there's nothing we can do." I hope there are at least a couple of competent class-action lawyers among the stranded.

Well, we already know what outcome DL's experts delivered (or at least didn't manage to avoid). And it wasn't pretty yesterday. And it still isn't all smooth yet.

Is DL now "too big to fail" (as in too big to be allowed to fail) in our airline market, a bit like some of our largest financial sector behemoths?

I sometimes prebook refundable rooms if it looks like there will be bad weather, especially if I'm connecting through ATL in the evening.

Did DL just cancel travel for UAMs scheduled to fly today even on flights that have taken off or are taking off today?

It seems so, and almost systematic at that. Not a nice surprise.

That's an odd extension of my comments.

My point is that it's improper to speculate on remediation, even in the most most generic sense (which has been done over and over in this thread: "more money + time = no failing!"), until we actually know what happened. Yes, obviously something bad happened, but let's see what that actually was.

And I don't think I've seen any mention here of the systems likely in play here being hosted by Travelport (i.e. with a corresponding SLA) rather than Delta:

"Travelport will continue to run the system infrastructure for the Delta platform in its Atlanta data center."

http://news.delta.com/delta-and-trav...responsibility

What hotels offer fully-refundable rooms? Most I ever see require cancellation the day before arrival (or at least by late afternoon the day of arrival). If hotels offered the equivalent of a refundable airline ticket (i.e. refundable at any time even after the scheduled date) I'd be all over it.

IMHO; hotels are worse than airlines at overselling because they don't offer this type of rate and they still overbook their rooms. Airlines at least have a plausible argument that they sell refundable tickets of which a certain percentage no-show and collect refunds after departure.

I've found rates that are cancellable on the day of arrival, it just depends.

Gate agent was making all standbys gate check their bags last night on our delayed flight at 2140, despite the GIDS screen showing 53 open seats. The standby list according to GIDS was only 17 deep! One lady literally couldn't check her bag and was forced to take her original flight delayed until 0130!

I would have said hell no, please get a redcoat.

At the same time, seems like a simple matter of putting the tag on, and getting on board with it anyway.

And the widget cancelled the fourth just as my shuttle hit the airport property. Why did they wait until two hours to cancel? If it had been cancelled when I got up this morning, I could have gotten onto UA.

So Delta can't get me anywhere today, because the United flights filled up with the other refugees. In fact, they can't even get me close and their rebooking for tomorrow is wretched.

I had to call my company agent and I am flying the dAArk side today. It cost my company about $900 in extra travel costs minus a refund from Delta of around $200 or so.

The GA said I should get ORC and a $200 voucher. Do you folks normally request ORC on the phone or via delta.com?

I guess I will figure out how to use the voucher for my next company trip, but will worry that whenever the voucher shows up.

Thank you,
David

Delta is very fortunate a line of thunderstorms hasn't hit any of their hubs during this debacle.

I hope everything is back to normal by tomorrow night when I fly out.