Why is Delta IT so poor?
 

Can't book using ecredits with app
Can't book using multiple ecredits on website
Ecredits can't be selected online
Constant booking errors with credit cards not matching cvc

The constant failures is stunning!
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Why is the sky blue? DL consistently exceeds expectations in so many ways except with their horrific IT.

You can do multiple online as long as the types allow being used together. Agents can do it even if they're not technically supposed to be allowed to be combined.

You used to beed to select the ecredit before searching for flights. You can't simply select on the payment screen.

Not sure on CVC. Agents are having same problem when booking over the phone.

Horrific IT and even more horrific lack of Inflight Services you must mean. DL should change its slogan to "Nothing is everything!"

With vouchers, I have learned that if its a "clean" voucher - from a ticket booked and cancelled, you are usually fine to rebook online. However, once you book, cancel - rebook with lets say 100 additional fare collection, cancel that ticket, you have now a voucher that is not workable online and requires a phone call. The phone agent who was super helpful seemed really confused as it seemed he had lots of manual work to sort thru the transactions. Sadly rebooking required another collection, so I am hoping this ticket will actually get flown.

Another scenario I can't seem to figure out is booking 2 passengers with their own vouchers, it doesn't seem to be possible online.

Because Deltamatic is still based on MS-DOS. They did put a GUI on top of it years ago but that didn't do anything to increase capability, it just made things easier for agents.

Technology moves slowly in aviation. New airplanes are still rolling out using 286 processors and some still get updates via floppy disk.

Way incorrect. Deltamatic is a series of interconnected mainframe computers using the IBM zTPF operating system. This OS is used by a small number of extremely high transaction processing environments. AMEX, VISA, and several airline and banking systems use this operating system as a central server, usually fronted by "mid-tier" and front end Lintel servers.

You should visit the Delta Museum. They have an entire display dedicated to Deltamatic. Some experienced agents still use the command prompt.

I have been there many times, and have worked on identical systems. The "command prompt" or "green screen" entries are supported by the zTPF mainframe environment (only). In some of the past calamities, only the Deltamatic system was running when external systems failed, and operations was able to continue in cases where older agents knew how it use that system directly. My point was simply that Deltamatic and the OSS (Operations Support Systems) systems are NOT MS-DOS based systems, but rather they are highly specialized mainframe environments.

Well that certainly goes against the narrative here for years. If it's so sophisticated then why is it so limited in what customers can do? Northwest provided far greater IT ability to customers. What NWA customers were able to do online requires a phone call at Delta.

Well, there is enough to this topic to fill a book. Suffice it to say that NW used the same TPF operating system, front-ended by servers and actually supplemented by a Unisys system as well. As for why some people claim NW technology was superior, the reasons (beyond subjectivity) would be more impacted by what NW chose to do with the technology as opposed to the technology itself.

Before the merger DL had plenty of superior products (e.g. FF miles showed up immediately), but the "politically" influenced decisions at merger time as to which systems survived and which were sunset... and how to integrate those environments were part of what caused some good things to disappear or be radically changed. I was not a NW patron so can't comment on or extend the apparent love that some have for the old NW systems. My singular point was to suggest that the technology used by the current DL systems is not really antiquated. Whether they are satisfying customers with the applications they deliver is a different question.

They made different prioritization decisions, which resulted in differences in features that were directly surfaced to customers for self-service. That has nothing to do with how advanced the underlying systems are. All of the features above could easily have a self serve UI implemented on top of existing systems, if it were a priority. We know the system can handle all of those transactions as agents are already able to perform them when you call in over the phone.

Also, a "command prompt" does not mean MS-DOS and it does not mean outdated - that's a core feature of all current systems, from the latest laptops to the server that this site runs on.

OP: Your feature requests != poor IT. Those feature requests (all but your last item, which could be a bug) you think they should have are corner cases at best. Just like any enterprise IT organization, you prioritize requests by the impact. Adding those requests provides benefit to maybe 1 in 1000 DL customers. Not to mention, they can be handled by other means (i.e. the web). This is all assuming that you know what you're doing, you didn't provide any info so we don't know.

News flash: all airline OS (and pretty much every OS I've ever used) have a CLI (that's command line interface for the uninitiated). They might have a nice GUI (Graphical User Interface) on top of it, but the CLI is always there and always more powerful. You can't implement features in a GUI if the underlying functionality isn't available via CLI. But you can do the opposite.

When I was an agent for UA, I hated the UI, so I always used the Apollo CLI. I could check people in in about half the time using the CLI. There were many features, especially around pricing and ticketing that were only available via CLI.

Even on macOS I have a terminal window open all the time so I can run commands that aren't available in the UI. Is that an Apple IT failure...of course not. In general the more features you add, the more complicated the UI gets. There are plenty of commands that simply don't need to be in the UI.

MS-DOS running airlines...I got a good loller out of that.

I didn't realize I had to list my qualifications and experience in using delta.com or the app but, yes, I know how to use both thank you.

Booking with ecredits on the app has disappeared. Trying to change any itinerary currently in my trips results in an error message that they cannot be changed online. This is the issue! I always have to call in to phone support, sometimes waiting hours for a call back. There is simply no excuse for this.

https://cimg5.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.fly...9389ff9d17.jpg

As a software developer myself, I strongly dislike the generic and overly-broad use of "IT" on FlyerTalk (and elsewhere) to refer anything even vaguely technically-related, but since it's so firmly entrenched, I've learned to roll with it. So although your points are well taken that feature requests aren't indicative of the underlying architecture/stability/etc. of the systems they're built on, it's pretty clear that DL lags competitors in some self-service functionality. And I'm not sure how appropriate it is to characterize them all as corner cases given how many people likely have eCredits from COVID cancellations etc.