Traveller

So now DL must train their employees to not only look at the traveller's ID but also to do age checks??? The 10 year old travelling alone I can see DL checking, but 15 year olds these days DO NOT look 15, so are you suggesting that DL check everyone's age? Maybe they should check my ID to see if I qualify for a senior discount?

That's asking a lot of the airlines.

DiverDave

From the linked article: Fifteen-year-old Blake Sims and 10-year-old sister Briana locked themselves in a downtown hotel room

David

J-M

Delta gave the entire line of passengers hotel vouchers. You can't expect an agent to be able to distinguish between 15 and 18 just by looking, and you certainly shouldn't expect the airline to card people before giving them vouchers.

The credit card was presented by the 15 year old kid to the hotel clerk. That would certainly imply that he was at least 18.

This is incorrect. The article states that he is 15. I do agree that he could pass for 18 though.

kmk5397

I'm gonna throw my two cents in here. I don't believe Delta is to blame at all, and not because I work for them! I feel the total blame should go to the parents in this situation. I have had many parents try to lie about their kids' age to get out of paying. It's funny because the kids always say...MOM I'm 14..not realizing Mom is trying to get out of something. I once had a Mom swear her child was 15 to get of paying $50..then when I needed the birth certificate/passport to check them in to Canada I simply did the math! Mom was alittle embarassed. Just yesterday I had a 13yr. old non-rev checking in to LAX. I asked where his parents are. They just dropped him off! Now rules for non-revs are different and he is allowed to do what he did..but the thought of a 13yr. just getting dropped off (not to mention he is standby) and not at least going to the gate with him blew my mind. I will say he seemed to know what he was doing..but I wouldn't have felt comfortable if that was my child. If SLC knew 2 UMNRS were coming this whole situation never would have happened. And I don't fault the FA's either. There are kids there ages seated away from parents when flights are full. There was absolutely no indication to them they were alone. About us giving the hotel voucher out..it may seem that we should have noticed when we issued the voucher. I can speak for how sometimes things are done in CVG. If we have entire plane of misconnects and have to issues vouchers. It's possible that the vouchers were already issued prior to landing. We simply hand them out as people come up the escalators. We don't go into the reservations..we're just trying to make things as fast as possible. So I can totally see how this happened.

Again..this is just my opinion:

sushibear

"As Flight 617 drew close to Salt Lake City, Blake told a flight attendant that he and Briana were flying by themselves and were worried they had missed their connection. "Blake had called me from the plane in Atlanta," Adriana Ables said. "He said, 'We are OK, but we'll be late.' It didn't occur to me that they were going to be stuck in Salt Lake." Ables said the flight attendant told the children there were more than 30 people on the aircraft who would miss their connections. The attendant told them to get help with the others at a booking desk."

"Unfortunately, their age was misrepresented during critical points of travel," Black said. Had Delta known their ages, Black said, airline employees would have acted to protect the children and contact their parents regardless of whether an extra fee had been collected." quoted from the article

Because I work around children and youth professionally, I have thought about this a lot today. No way was DL to blame for the events that set this fiasco in motion. However, I keep wondering what they might have done, and what their responsibility was, once they realized the nature of the situation.

If the little girl looks like her picture, the FA should have realized some questions needed to be asked when the brother told her the two of them were traveling alone. Even if the brother looked eighteen, the FA should have found out what was going on, especially when she realized the flight was arriving after 10:00 and odds were not good they would make their connecting flight.

I think he/she had the responsibility to make sure they were delivered to a senior-level DL agent on the ground. It is at this point that I think DL would have had limited choices. Our policy is that no one under eighteen can be alone with only one adult present, and the two (or more) adults required would have had to have passed a criminal background check. With no official instructions in writing from the parents and the unlikelihood of finding two DL employees at that time of night who had been screened for chaperone duty, I think all DL could reasonably have done would have been to call the police or children's services.

The thought of the children finding themselves being hauled off to protective services for the night really gets me steamed at the parents. This would have been a horrible experience for the children, but is probably what should have been done. When the Radisson manager learned the situation from DL, he should have called the police. Any number of horrible things could have happened to the boy and little girl. Those thoughts should be enough to make any decent parent have nightmares. I don't know what either of those parents was thinking about when they put this trip together, but I think they both should receive a visit from a local social worker. I'm serious, they put their children in harm's way.

majorwibi

These two bolded statements directly contradict each other when it comes to DL's policy.

If the boy traveling without the UM tag (aka 15+ years old) and the girl is said to be 12 and is traveling on the same PNR as the boy the DL did exactly what they should have done.

sushibear

I'm not sure what your point is. I said that I didn't think any fault lay with DL, at least initially. However, the 10-year-old needed to be treated as an unaccompanied minor regardless of whether she was on the same PNR as her brother. For DL, he would not have been eligible to be her "accompanist."
The more I think about it, I'm wondering why she did not raise red flags at Dothan. I would think most semi-aware boarding agents would have asked some questions.

Let me say again, I think the parents and TA were at fault initially, but once DL realized what was going there was more that they "should have done." I wonder what advice DL legal counsel would give in hindsight. Once DL contacted the Radisson about the children, the plot thickened.
both quotes are from OP article

icydog

I read your complete post and I agree 100%. NO matter who was at fault there was a little girl in a hotel room alone with her underage brother. God forbid someone had forced their way into their room while the hotel manager and the airline got into contention over who would take care of the kids. Nobody is trying to see this from the children's point of view. In spite of the absolute neglect shown by the parents the airline and the hotel were responsible because they were there under their watch. I shutter to think what could have happened to these kids. And I agree Children's Services should be paying a visit to both sets of parents.

Bonzz

I was in SLC this weekend and read the front page article in its entirety. I see this kind of thing in my work all the time. Parent or other family member makes a boneheaded or negligent decision that adversely affects outcome for family member then blames (usually belligerently) the people required to carry out their decision.

These parents could have prevented this in any number of ways: paying the relatively small fee for minors travelling alone assistance, getting better ticketing (two kids in a major airport trying to make a 28 minute connection, are you kidding me!), making fewer connections (Dothan to Fairbanks could've been much more easily done driving a couple of hours north and routing with BHM-SLC-FAI, cutting out an entire connection). This has me so mad. I guarantee these parents have retained a lawyer and initiated their frivolous lawsuit.

I agree with those who have stated that somewhere along the line a Delta employee should have been able to ferret out that these were two minors alone and in a tight spot. Agreed. Delta could have done better. FWIW when this small town southern boy was 16 he spent a frightening night in Jamaica, NY when stranded by a missed USair/Alitalia connection. My parents were were worried but accepted the responsibility of sending their child out on his own. But whose fault is this? Please. It's like when Charles Barkley said, "Just because I can play basketball, don't expect me to raise your kids."

iCorpRoadie

Okay, thank you all, I got home today and found the article cut out in the SL Trib but as of today NO ONE wrote anything to the Opinion, so with your help I drafted the following and sent it off:

It is hard for me to fault Delta, once aware of the problem Delta handled it appropriately. The real culprits are the parents and ONLY the parents. Essentially the parents tried to put one over on Delta to save a $75 fee, and they succeeded. The Travel Agent should have realized how risky it would be to put them on the last and ONLY flight to Fairbanks and adjusted accordingly. Yes, there are many 15 year-olds that look 18. It was the fathers fault because he chose to lie to the airline. Airlines are not in the baby-sitting business, they offer a basic service for a small fee. I can only hope that the kids are brighter than the parents. Fingers can be pointed at many steps in the process, but what started it all was the father lied to save a few bucks while expecting the Airline to help out if anything went wrong.

DiverDave

^ ^ ^ ^

Nice job,
David

TTT

Nice letter^

BaskGal

Bravo! ^

sushibear

I'm curious whether or not you have children. I know if you do this would not have happened, but--for arguments sake--if you do and it did, would you still think DL had done all that they should have?

I'm glad you wrote the letter, and I hope it gets published. Maybe it will keep some naive parents from doing something similar. I wonder if these two parents have come to grips yet with the stupidity of their choices.

LowlyDLsilver

Lifted shamelessly from the DL website:

An unaccompanied child should not be booked on the last connecting flight of the evening. This is to prevent the need for an overnight stay in a hotel.

Does anyone have empirical evidence of this being enforced?? Would DL indeed refuse to book a (known) UM on the last flight out ... because if so, since the last flight out is also the ONLY flight out, it would preclude them from travelling on DL if the parents were truthful about what was going on. So the little white lie may have had two purposes.

The stupidity of the parents leaves me dumbfounded. My kids know their way around an airport well enough to get someplace, but I'm not going to send MY 14 year old out there without help just yet, and not even on the next-to-last flight of the day ... I know better. These morons were asking for trouble, and they got it.