Justin D Stern

Hi All: I had an unfortunate experience with a Delta agent at ORD yesterday and it would be great to get some feedback and advice on whether it is appropriate to seek compensation.


On 12/1 I was booked ORD-BOS on RPA6139, which canceled around 7AM due to snow in BOS. I rebooked myself ORD-CVG-BOS, landing in BOS at 6:34PM on DAL1608 (originally scheduled arrival was 4:26PM). Not so bad, as my main constraint was a 7PM dinner meeting in BOS.


At ORD, I asked a DL representative prior to security if there was any chance of being rebooked on UAL1223, a direct ORD-BOS departing at 11:55 with 2 open seats in Y according to united.com. In the process of trying to rebook me on UA, the agent "lost" my confirmed and checked-in DL ORD-CVG-BOS itinerary. Sure enough, the agent was unable to confirm me with AA or UA on any flight that day and someone else jumped on the ORD-CVG-BOS itinerary. In the end, the agent ticketed me on UAL1581, departing ORD at 12:10AM the following day, Dec 2, as anything on DL metal would have to be much later the following day. I told the agent I would much, much prefer the ORD-CVG-BOS route but she told me there was nothing she could do. I was told the ticket now belongs to UA and, if I had a problem, I should take it up with them.


I am sympathetic to IROPS, and I do appreciate the agent's attempt to rebook me on an earlier flight with AA or UA, but the agent's cancelation of my BOS-CVG-ORD confirmed ticket in the process (and without communicating this to me at any point) left me incredibly frustrated. I received no apology and when I expressed my disappointment I was told DL will probably cancel the CVG-BOS anyways (it landed on time). Of course, I ended up having to cancel my dinner meeting and I had a very, very long day waiting on standby on earlier UA flights.


I am a long-term B6 loyalist, although I've grown frustrated with B6's handling of IROPS, which is why I've been moving some of my flying to DL. But I think I'll put a stop to that ASAP. I feel that I am due compensation due to the agent's cancelation of my itinerary without my permission -- even a simple apology and acknowledgement of a mistake would've been appreciated.


I am curious if anyone on the forum has had a similar experience.


Thanks!

reimero

I've not had that specific sequence of events, however, I do know that once they transfer you to another airline, your reservation does get canceled. When that's come up in my case, however, the agents were very clear about this before processing the change, so I knew there were no take-backs. My suspicion is that when you asked for the transfer to UAL, the agent first canceled the remainder of your current itinerary, then worked on the UAL booking rather than the other way around.

My suggestion would be to reach out to Delta either by phone or Twitter: it's not been my experience that DL would leave a customer hanging like that. In fact, I did at one point have DL "take back" a change because I realized the rebooking was never going to work (it involved an international flight and getting to an airport 2 1/2 hours away without traffic for a flight departing in 3 1/2 hours.) Delta is usually very, very good with IROPS, it sounds to me like yours just got mishandled.

The Situation

From the days when AS and DL codeshared, I remember it is easy to give a ticket to another carrier, but impossible to take them away. I don't think OP understood the risks and I think the agent did the best they could, but things unfortunately did not work out. Communication is very important when dealing with multiple parties. When I used to have IRROPs on AS, I would make all the changes post security with the gate agents in control of the flights. My first step would be to talk to an agent from the airline that holds the ticket (DL in OP's case) and ask if they would be willing to sign the ticket over to another carrier. Then, I would go talk to the agent in control of the flight I wanted to be on (the UA flight in OP's case) and tell them what I was doing, and ask them if I could hold a seat. I would then go back to the agent for the airline holding the ticket (DL in OPs case) that I previously talked to and ask them very nicely to sign the ticket over. Most recently, I had a redcoat (supervisor) call to another airline to see if they had space available on an alternate flight during an oversold flight. Point is, you need to ensure that you have all your ducks in a row before you do something like this, because there are no takebacks.

Also, I doubt someone else jumping on the CVG itinerary would have mattered (DL would have oversold it if they had to) - it was more likely they could not get the ticket back from UA.

Duke787

Honestly I think you are to blame for this one -- I wouldn't give any compensation. You did ask for the IRROPs re-booking to UA which is likely to sink you for compensation.

Once you gave the DL agent approval to switch carriers, I don't think you can ever view this as unapproved re-booking? You authorized her to switch you to 11am, she wasn't able to, your seats on the original flight were gone (due to IRROPs someone else probably grabbed either the whole thing or the relevant inventory for ORD - CVG or CVG - BOS), and then she managed to get you on the next flight that could get you to BOS (which was UA since DL didn't have anything available).

If you hadn't asked for the UA flight, the whole thing would be different (and that's how I originally read your OP but upon re-reading I saw that you asked for the switch to UA).

You live and you learn but in the same scenario, where weather is causing major issues, you don't ask to switch carriers. There is too much uncertainty, especially when flying from a major UA hub, the likelihood of those seats not confirming was close to 100%. Why would UA ever give those seats to DL when they are dealing with their own major IRROPs due to the same weather?

iflyalexair

This is not accurate. Tickets and confirmed segments are two distinctly different components in an airline PNR. Let's say you have a reservation from JFK-LAX-JFK on DL. Your PNR would reflect two segments. If ticketed, there would be an accompanying ticket field with two flight coupons, one for each segment. Let's say the flight JFK to LAX is oversold and you volunteer to take an AA flight. The agent would sell in the AA segment and would leave the JFK-LAX segment on DL. Removing the segment from your reservation would drop the number of booked passengers decrease by one (no longer oversold). This is important only for inventory management and to justify VDB compensation for DL's bean counters. So, now you'd have three segments confirmed in the reservation:
1 DL JFK LAX
2 AA JFK LAX
3 DL LAX JFK
At this moment, AA will have a PNR in their system that reflects the booking of confirmed space on their JFK LAX flight. But there's no associated flight coupon for the AA flight. In the old days, you would simply print the coupon to paper, endorse it, and AA would collect the paper coupon for processing at the boarding gate. Now, the agent can go into the ticket and exchange the first coupon to generate a new ticket number based off of coupon 1 so that there is an electronic coupon that will populate in the AA reservation. It's still a DL ticket on 006 stock. DL can still further exchange that coupon, reverse the exchange by voiding the transaction, etc.

In the OP's situation, the DL agent clearly cancelled the CVG segments when they were cleaning up the reservation before ticket reissue. Once you release the inventory and save the PNR, that inventory goes back out in the world for other people to snag. What would have been a better play for the agent was to just sell the OAL segments, reorder the segments in the reservation and reissue the ticket.

apodo77

I disagree if the GA canceled the DL ticket when they didn't need to and lost the seat for the OP.

SamOF

Why would asking for any particular rebooking option mean that you are giving up your confirmed seat regardless of whether the rebooking is successful? There's no reason to delete the confirmed space until the agent is sure that the United flight was confirmed.

If a United flight actually has space, there's also a perfectly reasonable chance that they would confirm a DL sell. Has happened to me in major weather events plenty of times.

And again, there's no reason not to ask—for a competent agent, it should not work the way it worked for the OP.

btonkid12345

OP - while I sympathize, I think it’s a bit much to say you won’t fly DL again over this. It’s not like this agent purposely did this to mess with you - they made an error but didn’t acknowledge it.

They’re human and that can happen. Sucks they didn’t do things in order to keep your original in tact.

Did you ask for a Red Coat? They know how to better work in the system usually. Also any agent with a Supervisor sine can overbook main cabin so they could have put him back on the originals.

Justin D Stern

Thoroughly impressed by the quality and speed of comments on here!

Referring to SamOF, the issue, in a nutshell, is that in merely asking if it was a possibility to move to the 11:50AM ORD-BOS on UA, the DL agent voided my confirmed itinerary with DL before checking whether UA would sell the ticket to DL. I assumed I had a good chance because at the time UA hadn't canceled any of their ORD-BOS flights. UA refused to sell the 11:50AM to DL and would only issue a ticket to DL for the following calendar day -- hence the 12:10AM confirmed departure I was stuck with. At no point was it communicated to me that I would forfeit my rebooking with DL by merely asking if a rebooking to the 11:50AM UA flight was a possibility.

What do I think happened? The agent was poorly trained and/or exhausted and made a mistake,. Rather than apologize or try to overbook on ORD-CVG-BOS, I was told that "everything to BOS is getting canceled; the CVG flight probably won't make it anyways" and "it's a UA ticket now so go to their service desk." I don't fly DL often but now I know to look for a Red Coat!

hotturnip

You people, always blaming the victim.

Yes, this was mishandled by the DL employee. They should have checked out whether the requested itinerary was possible, and confirmed it with UA and the passenger before doing any cancellations. I've had agents with various airlines handle similar situations, and they always offered me the itinerary and got confirmation from me BEFORE changing my booking.

I'd just try to edit my complaint down as much as possible and send it on. You might get a few miles thrown at you. They probably won't do much else, but at least you'll get the apology the agent did not offer. I mean, come on: they messed around with your booking and caused you to be a whole day later than planned. That deserves an apology. A good agent would have known to protect your existing booking.

But this tale is a good reminder to everyone--be VERY EXPLICIT when discussing these matters with rushed agents, so that they don't go rogue on you like this one did.

iflyalexair

Yep. You'd be surprised how easy it is to cancel a segment. It's literally as easy as typing X(segment number) and a save and refresh would confirm the change and voila! The confirmed space is gone. It is easy as an agent to make a mistake and then you don't have the ability at your level to fix the mistake. Even if the agent explained his apparent error, the OP probably wouldn't have been very happy. It's an embarrassing situation to be in for the agent. That doesn't mean he shouldn't have tried to restore the cancelled segments by calling an inventory control or asking a supervisor with oversale ability reinstate the CVG connection.

MSPeconomist

Whenever I start to talk to an agent, whether phone or in an airport, about potential changes, i usually begin by saying very emphatically that they shouldn't do anything to cancel the current booking until we verify what's available/possible, but I sometimes fear that this could be interpreted as rude or insulting. I've experienced agents who are eager to give me coach as a SDC on a FC ticket for example.