Cancelled and stranded.
 

My daughter flew from Orlando to Williston, ND last month and her return flight was supposed to be tomorrow. Yesterday they canceled the Williston to Minneapolis part and rebooked it for the day later. Just that part which meant it was the day after her second part of the journey. She couldn't get through on line or the phone so she went to the airport. No one there. So she called them again. Literally on hold for 10 hours and then she was cut off!!! This morning, the day before her scheduled flight home, she received an email canceling the whole flight and told her they were giving her an ecredit to be used within two years. She is back at the airport and this time someone is trying to help her but they are on hold as well. No surprise. I guess my question is are they obligated to get her back home? She is an adult not a minor.

There is currently one flight a day from XWA-MSP. It departs at 3:10pm and arrives in MSP at 4:48pm.
For whatever reason the flight is cancelled in advance for Thursday. It did operate today (Wednesday).

The challenge is there is currently only one flight a day on MSP-MCO and it departs MSP at 9:40am.
There is no ability to fly XWA-MSP-MCO on Delta without an overnight stay in Minneapolis.
This is a problem others are experience with such a limited, bare bones schedule and only one flight per day from many of these really small outstations.

Plausable Options that I see:
1) Drive to Minot, where Delta has a 6:28am departure to MSP that could connect on to the MSP-MCO flight
2) The only other flight out of Willston is a United flight at 9:18 am to DEN that appears to have a valid onward connection on DEN-MCO
3) Take the Delta flight XWA-MSP overnight in MSP then fly to MCO the next morning

Not meaning to be flip, but I would recommend either a rental car or checking out the Amtrak Empire Builder (trains 7 and 27) which runs through both Minneapolis and Williston ND. The train is running tonight, leaving MSP at 10:20 pm and arriving in Willston at 11:07 am. the next morning.

I happened to see this train running westbound in the vicinity of Cut Bank, Montana last week (I drove US 2 from Spokane to Fort Belknap Agency, MT; the train tracks it uses are generally right next to US 2). It conveys a sleeper car as well as a coach car.

OP's daughter is in Williston

the eastbound Empire Builder (trains 8/28) leaves WSN at 659pm and gets to MSP tomorrow morning at 743am ... she should have a reasonable chance of making the 0940 DL departure

The XWA-MSP schedule was reduced to one flight daily from two for the month of May back on April 12th -- https://www.airliners.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1444505
The current 1 daily flight has not been cancelled so it sounds like daughter/OP did not get schedule change info and were assuming original flights were still operating (MSP-MCO flights were also reduced from 4x daily to 1x daily)?

Is your daughter a Twitter user? She should be able to get a quicker response by tweeting Delta.

Deleted.

In addition or an alternative to Twitter, if your daughter has the Fly Delta app and an iPhone, there's a text chat feature (I believe under "More" > "Message Us") which allows messaging with the Delta rep, which might get her through faster than the phone line.

Also, in these circumstances, if she's able to look up the flights she wants to be rebooked on ahead of time, she can ask to be rebooked on those flights and the rebooking process can go more quickly once she gets a hold of an agent (whether online, by phone, or in person). As long as there's space, Delta agents are pretty good about rebooking on your preferred alternative flights in a cancellation situation.

Though given that any Delta itinerary departing from Williston would require an overnight in MSP given the schedules over the next few days, she might consider looking at alternate airlines or means of travel, and saving the Delta ecredit for future travel, as other posters have suggested.

Thank you so much everyone for your advice. The Delta people at Williston airport were able to get her a flight for Friday leaving out of Minot. She will just drive there. The earliest they could get her on from Williston was the 21st, which obviously wouldn't work. I guess the lesson she has learned from this is at all possible go to the airport to get it sorted out. Thank you.

Under normal circumstances twitter or phone agents are perfectly capable of handling the issues in a timely fashion. This is hardly normal circumstances. I would caution taking too big of a lesson from the worst situation in airline history and applying them when things go back to normalish.

Don't forget that she is also entitled to a refund of her DL ticket. A new ticket on UA tomorrow morning at 9:06 AM with a connection at DEN, gets her to MCO at 5:06 PM. Selling for $498. Also possible that DL would rebook her on that, thus avoiding the drive and a 2-day wait.

That's very true. But I'm not sure when things will be normal again.

A word of warning for passengers flying to secondary or small city airports in these days of flight cancellations, is to have a back up plan in hand, either driving to a larger airport. using, train transportation in areas where available. I wouldn't count on having the scheduling flexibility one was used to in pre COVID days.

And PUSH the airlines. It is not your job as a paying customer to be flexible and offer renting a car or taking a train as a solution. You paid to get from wherever to your intended destination. If they can't get you there, ask to be booked on another airline, connect through a different hub, a different time, etc. Renting a car, taking a bus or a train is the absolute last resort in my book. If I ended up having to do that, I would ask for a refund (to cover the cost of renting a car, Uber, whatever) or submit those expenses for reimbursement.

As you and your daughter probably already know, this part of ND can seem very empty and isolated. She might want to consider driving from Williston to Minot on Thursday afternoon rather in the middle of the night for that 6 am departure. I've done the drive and would not want to do it late at night, especially alone, even though it's essentially a straight shot east on one of the major roads in the state. It looks desolate.

For others who might not know these airports, Williston is the town that's considered to be the center of the oil patch (shale) while Minot has an Air Force base and I think is/was the site of the state fare. IIRC it was a major part of the SAC program during the Cold War. In fact, you can see/tour former missile silos in this part of the USA.

Those days are over. Carriers are not offering anything beyond truly token gestures. The response in this situation would have been a credit or a refund. It's going to be this way for a good long while. No pot of cash to work from.

Thank you, that is very good advice. I will pass the info on to her.

BTW, I've stayed at a newish Hyatt House hotel on the outskirts of Minot which seems to generally be in the direction of the airport. It's fine but there aren't any places nearby to get food if the hotel isn't serving from their evening bar menu. I don't know whether there are airport hotels.

They should've been willing to book on UA or at least Amtrak to MSP. (Amtrak uses the same ticketing process as airlines, just transportation is on a train instead of plane)

I know some have suggested the Empire Builder as an alternative from Williston to Minneapolis. While it's nice if you have at least a roomette - it's uncomfortable in coach overnight - it is commonly late. According to Amtrak the Empire Builder in 2018 was on time only 44% of the time. (See stats here.) If anyone thinks to take the train for the scheduled 7:43am arrival in Minneapolis Union Depot to catch a 9:40am flight out of MSP, that would be a bad idea.

There's probably less freight traffic on BNSF tracks (media indications are that freight operators have seen only a relatively mild downturn in business), but I still wouldn't chance it.

AFAIK all Amtrak trains stop at the terminal in St Paul. It wouldn't be fun to get from there to MSP if there's any rush hour traffic (unlikely to be bad in the COVID-19 era) or (more importantly) road construction delays or detours. Taking the light rail will require a change in Minneapolis, near downtown, and frequency has been reduced.

There's a recent thread in the DL forum focusing on recent experiences at MSP.

Maybe Amtrak service has improved, but they always were subject to notorious delays except along the northeast (and maybe west coast) corridor for the business oriented express trains.

I wasn't suggesting it was the best option. However it's an option when all else fails. Gets you to MSP where even an overnight is quicker than waiting for next flight days later from origin.

A lot of the delays of past years have decreased. I've used the train lots over the years and have seen it go through cycles regarding delays. (Midwest/west coast only, not East coast)

The seats on Amtrak are Sleeper seats and thus comfortable for overnight. (Midwest/westcoast anyway, east coast uses different stock) Roomette are nice if taking the train the whole length, but otherwise aren't needed. (Again I speak only of Midwest/ west coast)

The Empire builder has been much much more reliable than it used to be. That said, Amtrak still measures delays in hours and .... happens. The last time I took a train to Minneapolis (and caught a plane), I booked a flight at ~6pm with the empire builder arriving around 8am. Train was on time, but I wouldn't do it any other way as it isn't always.
I went to MSP by uber, picked up a rental car (I have so many enterprise points I never use) and hung out with friends (used to live there) for the day. Traffic is perfectly reasonable, as it is an AM departure and MSP is really just a straight shot down West 7th (35E also generally isn't so bad SB in the AM). I'd be more worried about the the train than the last mile. The new station is far easier to get to the Airport from than the old one out by midway. If you did want to take public transit, I'd take the 54 rather than LR. Be much faster (~30min less) and is direct, though I'm lazy and take uber.
Going to Minot is the safer play, IMHO.

There appear to be quite a few restaurants, fast food places, etc about two miles east of that Hyatt House.

If you don't have a giant pile of luggage, the 54 bus is by far the best way to transfer from Union Depot to MSP. Door to door in 30 minutes on a limited stop route. Train is super slow for that move.

Although I haven't done it specifically with Delta I have found text chatting a very viable alternative to calling when dealing with other companies such as banks and Apple. The wait time is usually minutes versus the hours long hold times I keep hearing about.

I doubt DL would have put daughter on UA as the DL flight she was on was cancelled a month ago over the weekend of Apr 12th during May schedule pull-down and they wouldn't have considered it an IRROP situation. You can see the one remaining flight operated as scheduled -- https://flightaware.com/live/flight/...020Z/KXWA/KMSP

Not to make any assumptions or be flippant either, but the lesson also must be that travel right now should only be taking place for essential reasons. You never mentioned hers, I'll assume that it was. But these cancellations and such will continue until we're on the other side of this unfortunately.

Yes, you're correct that Minot was a SAC base. The host wing is Global Strike Command now, and it hosts both a Bomb Wing and a Missile Wing. This is all publicly available information pulled from the Minot AFB Wikipedia page if anyone wants to learn more. There are also fact sheets about the units, aircraft, and missiles that discuss their history.

you have to pay to get into North Dakota? one of my ROTC classmates (may have been a year before or after) was assigned as a Minuteman combat crew member at MOT ... he had a roll-the-eyes reaction: "Why not Minot?"

I have to respectfully disagree in that we if do not travel, airlines will see no reason to restore service and these cancellations will sadly continue for much longer than necessary. The more demand they see, the sooner we get to the other side.

As someone mentioned earlier about smaller airports, I have seen that myself recently. Last week I travelled to TLH. During “normal” times DL usually had a minimum of 6 flights per day. Now, they have reduced the schedule to 2 (a morning and evening). On the day of my travel the morning flight cancelled (luckily I was on the evening so was not impacted). My return is next week and there is a morning and afternoon departure. I’m on the afternoon departure and hoping it does not cancel as it appears to be booked more heavily than the morning. But, I will be monitoring frequently in the chance it does, to switch to the morning. I think for those of us traveling right now we should check our flights a minimum of twice a day in the week leading up to travel just to be safe.

Autocorrect strikes again, but I assume that there's indeed a fare to enter the fair. Otherwise it just wouldn't be fair at all.

Some of the missile silos look awfully isolated; they're scattered over the landscape. There's at least one that's maintained as a historic site. I went down to see the living quarters and equipment, which was very interesting. It seemed like a time warp from around 1960.

Which was done on purpose so that one incoming missile couldn't take them all out. The missiles are spread all over the upper Midwest and Rocky Mountain states (our missile bases are F.E. Warren AFB in Cheyenne, WY, Malmstrom AFB in Great Falls, MT, and Minot AFB in ND). But the crews are often flown out to the missile sites via helo. Many of the silos are often in the middle of someone's farmland too. And some of the farmers are known, not in negative way, to refer to them as "their missiles".

There were a ton of SAC bases, particularly for B-52s, all over the country during the height of the Cold War. The B-52s were spread out across multiple bases for a similar reason that the missiles are spread so far apart. After the Cold War, B-52 ops have been consolidated to Minot AFB and Barksdale AFB in Shreveport, LA. Two reasons not to be a B-52 crew member. ;) Many of the bases are still active in some capacity and have had their mission reset (e.g: Fairchild AFB in Spokane is now a KC-135 base - it was a B-52 base during and just after the Cold War). Others have been completely shut down or are used in other civilian capacities but not necessarily militarily anymore though you can sometimes still see remnants of the base via Google Maps, such as the Christmas tree alert ramps near the runways.

Marquette (MQT) uses the former K.I. Sawyer AFB ... I had a forced RON there in 2007 when I was attempting a transcontinental turboprop run; MQT-MSP cancelled due to thunderstorms, and I spent the night in the Red Fox Inn (the former VOQ), where my family had stayed in 1966 while on a road trip from DC -- visited my parents' aunts and uncles in Chicago; then headed home via the Upper Peninsula (spent the next night at Kincheloe AFB), North Bay, Ottawa, and relatives in the Morristown NJ area

I'm sure you did too on your programs but I had plenty of visits to Moses Lake, another former Cold War B-52 base, while on KC-46. With flying out of BFI, if we were doing anything heavy weight, we often had to hop over to Moses Lake first to gas up to heavy/max weight since the runway at BFI wasn't long enough to permit the heavy weight takeoff while Moses Lake had more than ample runway lengths. Moses Lake also permitted other maneuvers you couldn't do in the far busier Seattle airspace. And it wasn't uncommon to see C-17s from McChord also flying around Moses Lake to do touch-n-go's and other training that was easier to do in less crowded airspace.

it's been a VERY long time since I was last at the former Larson AFB at MWH ("Moses Water Hole") ... in the early to mid 1980s JAL had a crew training base there, and it wasn't at all unusual to see one of their 747s in the pattern

Boeing Flight Test also uses the Glasgow Industrial Airpark (formerly Glasgow AFB, also a SAC base), about 15 miles north of the namesake town in northeast Montana ... I spent three weeks there in the fall of 1980 with the 767 engine test program (a PW JT9D-7R4 installed in the # 2 position on RA001, the first 747), and another week in early 1981 with the 757 Rolls-Royce RB.211 test program ... Mrs767 and I drove through the town on U.S. 2 in June 2017 on our DC-to-Seattle trip, and the motel where most of the test support team stayed looked remarkably unchanged
https://cimg8.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.fly...3b3e6fd85.jpeg

the little coffee shop across the street was considerably more contemporary, though
https://cimg1.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.fly...93b11ccce.jpeg

DL 3576 from MOT to MSP operated on time today, arriving one minute early at C4. It was a 175 operated by SkyWest.

DL 1714 from MSP to MCO is in flight, having left three minutes early from F6 and due to arrive two minutes late.

So assuming that the OP's daughter didn't have any problems driving to Minot, everything should be good.

Everything went fine. Thank you 😊

Yay, I'm glad it worked and apparently even went smoothly in the end.