Handling parents IRROP from afar:
 

CASE STUDY:

Feb 2010 Chilean earthquake two days before my parents and their friends' cruise disembark in Santiago.

Upon finding out about the quake and verifying damages and pending short term closure of SCL I called their airline and upon confirming flights cancellations, I immediately reconfirm them and my aunt/uncle to a flight days later not standby onto next available flight.

Next I call their travel insurance and got confirmation along with agent name and ID that their out of pocket expenses are covered.

Then two rooms for two at Crown Plaza were booked for 5 days in SCL in a neighbourhood where there was minimal damage.

Their pier to airport transfer company was contacted and their booking changed to Pier to Crown Plaza and then Crown Plaza to airport.

All these were emailed to them C/O their Princess ship.

They got off the ship, transfer driver lend them his phone, I confirmed all arrangement for them and they had an all expense paid post cruise vacation.

While in SCL they met other passengers from their cruise who were coming back from the airport with all their bags after waiting standby all day with no luck. Others had to grab whatever accommodations they can while some had to line up at the ticket office of airlines.

CONCLUSION:

As a son, this day and age should use the internet and other technologies to assist with their parents travel IRROP or WX issues instead of carping.

EC regulation 261/2004 is pretty clear on that issue, no matter what an airport poster or BA agent might tell you. Phone calls, feeding and - if necessary - accommodation are obligatory in any event of longer flight delays and cancellations. Compensation, though, is not.

An Opposite Case Study
 

Offering the counter-point to tentseller's excellent story.

Situation: young (22), stubborn, inexperienced cousin from the UK visiting. We meet up in LAS, spend a few fun days, and take separate flights home; she is headed to MCO for the night and we are headed to DCA. The plan is for her to overnight in MCO then fly up midday the next day to meet us at DCA.

Problem: She texts from the air saying they are circling PHX dumping fuel; there is a mechanical issue and they're diverting. She's obviously panicked, moreso by the fact that the passengers are using phones in flight than anything.

By the time she's landed (40 minutes or so later) we had:

-Contacted the airline and placed an award on hold, PHX-DCA, nonstop, departing around 9am the next day. The only down-side here is we were using US miles and they don't do one-way awards but the total award price was only 25k miles and no last-minute booking fees due to my status; way better than the $900 fare.

As fate would have it, we actually had her checked bags with us, to save her on the bag fees plus the girl does not travel light, no need for her to drag the family tuba down to MCO for 12 hours

-Found a points-stretcher room at a Hilton-family hotel 4 minutes from the airport, located the number to call to arrange the airport shuttle, and downloaded an airport map which we sent in email so she'd be able to find her way to the hotel shuttle

-Lined up a friend who lives in PHX "just in case" our cousin needed a ride to a Target or something for incidentals

The plane landed in PHX at around 8:30pm local time and her departure for DCA *had she chosen to do so* was around maybe 10am, leaving plenty of time to have a decent dinner, hot shower, relax in a comfy hotel bed, watch some tv and enjoy a nice flight the next day.

BUT I told you she is a stubborn girl and she refused to take any of these solutions. She insisted on waiting for the MX plane to be repaired, which ultimately happened around 10:30pm local; she arrives at MCO at 4am or so. The budget hotel holding her prepaid reservation is no longer operating a shuttle for the night; they can pick her up at 6 but if she wants to go there now, she needs to take a taxi. There are 2 taxi's at the taxi stand; the drivers have an actual altercation over who gets to have her fare, and the winner ends up ripping her off to the tune of $70 for a 7-minute drive. She gets about 2 hours sleep in a bed she describes as "itchy", no breakfast, pays a dollar to print her boarding pass, back to the airport, and the kicker: her flight to DCA has gone MX. 3 more hours of delay. We pick her up at DCA, put her in our guest room and she sleeps for about 20 hours (hence missing a full day of vacation).

Moral of the story: sticking to the original plan and waiting for the airline to solve your problems is quite often a bad, bad idea.

I do have sympathy for the OP, since the situation is frustrating. However, no airline headquartered in the U.S. will do anything for you if the delay or cancellation is due to weather (even weather at a seemingly unrelated airport). So it will be no use to switch your flying to another airline.

This happens from time to time, and you either (a) take out insurance or (b) live with the consequences. I have always opted for (b).

I live in Chicago, so to just add a few data points:
1. Today (Thursday): It's been raining on and off here all day. I drove downtown at noon & the fog/cloud cover was so low that I couldn't see above about the 50th floor of the John Hancock building.
2. Yesterday (Wednesday): Yesterday's weather couldn't have been nastier. Rain & dark clouds in the morning followed by a brief clearing followed by dense fog in the afternoon, followed by more rain.
3. Yesterday (Wednesday): Oh, and huge storms (tornadoes) across Kansas & Missouri yesterday, throwing, which surely led to a lot of cancellations on flights coming from the south and west. Of course, that leads to cascading delays.
4. Yesterday (Wednesday): I mainly fly AA, and know that AA posted on their FB page yesterday that a lot of flights out of DFW were cancelled yesterday as planes were inspected for hail damage. (Of course, that leads to cascading delays, too.)
5. Tuesday: Tornadoes roll through Oklahoma City & shut down a lot of flights out of Dallas, etc. (See item #4 for just one example of the aftermath.)
6. Sunday: Massive tornadoes roll through Joplin, Missouri. Again, these lead to cascading delays & cancellations.
7. Last Friday & Saturday: Fog so thick in Chicago that you couldn't see more than a few dozen yards at times.
8. Today: I'm currently looking at a NBC News weather map that's showing the entire eastern half of the country--from Chicago/Dallas & on--at risk for severe thunderstorms & possible tornadoes over the next 24 hours.

So, just to recap, the midwest has been stuck in a horrible weather pattern for a week now. Recovering from a single weather delay can take a day or two. Recovering from day after day after day of horrible weather can take a lot longer. Do you know anyone who tried to fly to/from the east coast between December 26 and early January? I was on one of the last flights out of PHL on the 26th, but there were people who slept at airports for days because--unlike in rainy, foggy conditions--driving hundreds of miles in a blizzard just wasn't an option.

If I were in your shoes and looking at the current weather forecast in Chicago, I'd be booking a car/train/bus to Detroit for your friends. It's the only logical option.

Reminds me of when I was sitting at the LH Tower lounge last December and there was an SQ flight from the previous day still on the board. :D

I guess rescheduled flights would be one of options from United..

Happy or not.. travellers delayed by weather may have to resort to this solution..

WX-related delays are the pax responsibility in the USA. Plain and simple, you are on your own at ORD and any expenses you incur are yours and yours alone. It is in UA's interest to get pax to destination as soon as possible so, if that is a long time away, it is because that is when the next seat is. That said, I would still check all possible routes to pax destination from ORD (and MDW) and: 1) ask UA to rebook on another carrier if there is sooner and better availability; and 2) look at earlier UA flights which may be booked full and still go to the gate and ask to standby.

The weather is unpredictable, overbooking is not. The airlines deliberately overbook flights--for example, they know they have x seats on a plane, but they sell x + 5 tickets. Unless airlines are much more powerful than I know, they can't deliberately change the weather. Thus, the two are not the same.

The airlines have historical data that let them predict how many people will be no-shows on given flights, so on the majority of overbooked flights, they don't need to bump anyone. The airlines know that there will be some flights where more people show up than there are seats, and they will have to pay compensation. However, they know that the revenue from the additional tickets they can sell outweighs the bump compensation they'll have to pay.

If I knew for sure that I could win horse racing bets 80% of the time, I'm not going to care about the 20% of the bets I lose, because I'll be making a profit even factoring in the losses.

I'm starting to understand more why airlines overbook..

Sometimes connections are delayed and flyers miss the leg.. so that's one factor..

Another seems to be their ability to rebook based on other flight capacity.. more confirmations now means more revenue

Also, keep in mind that even when they 'lose' the overbooking game, the airlines often still win.

As seats get scarce, airlines pull the discounted fare buckets, so the fares they sell to overbook will be in the higher fare buckets, if not full Y. Compare the price of a typical full-Y fare to typical VDB or even IDB compensation rates, and you'll see that even if the airline has to IDB someone on one or two of your flight legs because they sold you an 'overbooked' ticket, they'll probably still come out ahead in monetary terms.

Certainly IDB creates bad-will that could impact future business, but often the VDB offers are often accepted, and they're typically a win-win (the airline still made money after paying the VDB compensation, the VDB pax is happy they got 'paid' hundreds of dollars to wait a few hours).

I agree..

the logic has become crystal clear.. overbooking means more customers, less customers to competition.. equals more revenue..

There should be FAA regulations to even the playing field..

And the OP is not an atheist, he should be asking god for a hotel room and food. After all, he is the one responsible for the weather delay, not the airline.