bretthexum

We booked a trip to Maui ages ago, right as CV19 was just creeping up. It's scheduled for middle of January for our whole family. Since then, there's been at least 8 schedule changes. I got a call from Delta asking if we still planned on taking the trip. I wonder if they're proactively seeing who's going to cancel to cut capacity even more. They seemed to bump up capacity after Hawaii announced the pre-arrival testing to avoid quarantine, but now seems to be scaling back. Our 764 on our return got cut last week for a 757 to SEA.

Just kind of a strange deal as I've never directly been called by Delta for something like this.

Scudsone

We were planning a trip to Hawaii for the first two weeks of January, but after Delta changed the flights for the third time, making one of our inter-island connections extremely difficult and inconvenient, and removing the non stop lie flat back red eye back to JFK for a 5am transfer in MSP we canceled it last week, just before the 1 month out window to get full refunds on our hotels. Had no trust that the flight schedules would change again and again and leave us with days wasted at the airport or groggy from odd hour flights.

Perhaps if delta was more consistent or predictable there would be less cancelations. Every flight I’ve taken since COVID (4 round trips) has been changed around at least once. Always for the worst.

cmd320

If you're looking for lie-flats, AA has a consistent schedule of 777s and 787s on DFW-Hawaii at this point.

ethernal

Interesting. Delta is probably seeing huge close-in cancellations. While this is always a quiet period (between Thanksgiving and Christmas), demand has collapsed over the past week. TSA data shows Monday had only 500K passengers which is the lowest travel volume since the day of July 4th (in a normal year that would be fantastic, but obviously this year is different). The 7-day moving average for YoY traffic got as high as 41% over Thanksgiving - it's now back down to 32% and shows no sign of bottoming out. All the "slow gains" in YoY traffic from August onwards have been wiped out in a week.

There will obviously be a spike for Christmas, but if cases/hospitalizations don't improve in the next several weeks I think January will be pretty rough between the usual seasonal dip and reduced willingness to fly. I guess I'm surprised that Delta is proactively "testing" whether existing demand is real, but it makes complete sense - especially if December bookings are seeing a lot of no-shows / late cancels as cases rise.

Scudsone

Good to know, would consider except working off canceled flight credits from April - July. Also to/from DFW still means not a non-stop. Plus Hawaii keeps changing their restrictions regarding testing and quarantine so that coupled with the uncertainty of the flight schedule made us cancel and book for the Turks and Caicos instead.

DLATL777

Absolutely, not to mention actual service in F. 100% a better option.

bretthexum

For sure yes. The ironic part is my in-laws tried to call and cancel about 10 days ago and had a 2.5 hour wait to talk to someone. So they just hung up and figured they'd try again. Then we get the proactive call to cancel the same flight.

hansyuwiwb

Tip is to call the US number foreign language line. Chinese and Korean are usually the shortest wait, but you could get through Spanish/French with 5-10 minutes as well. 80% of the agents are US based and bilingual. I do speak both Chinese and Italian, but I find either line to be willing to speak English if you ask them to.