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Delta Air Lines lost an estimated $500 million from the IT outage initially caused by CrowdStrike. The outage started on July 19th and by the weekend most airlines were back to normal operations. Delta continued to suffer for days and left millions of passengers without flights. This past week, the airline retained high profile counsel and is seeking damages. Customer faith in the carrier has been shaken, but this has also had an impact on Delta’s employees.
DL to employees: pic.twitter.com/cxkOtXpGpa
— JonNYC (@xJonNYC) August 2, 2024
Employees were the ones who had to deal with customers at the airports, on planes, and on the phone. While the airline was far from recovered, Delta’s CEO took off for the Olympics in Paris (citing that he had business there as the airline is a sponsor). Aviation watchdog, @JonNYC reports that Delta is trying to make a peace offering with its employees by offering each of them two positive space passes. These allow employees to book confirmed, complimentary travel to anywhere that Delta flies. These are different than when employees fly nonrevenue as the priority here will bump them ahead of paying customers.
Delta continues to blame the issues encountered on CrowdStrike and still has yet to fully accept fault for its systems that compounded the issue. The Department of Transportation (DOT) is still digging into what happened here and Delta’s CEO has been largely dismissive. Delta has changed its tune to reimburse customers and is actively working to do so.
Anthony’s Take: I feel for the employees and am sure that they took the brunt of customers’ frustrations. I’m all for rewarding them. I’m not sure free flights, as the airline continues to get its footing, is the best way to go.
(Featured Image Credit: Delta Air Lines.)
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Advertiser & Editorial Disclosure: The Bulkhead Seat earns an affiliate commission for anyone approved through the links above This compensation may impact how and where links appear on this site. We work to provide the best publicly available offers to our readers. We frequently update them, but this site does not include all available offers. Opinions, reviews, analyses & recommendations are the author’s alone, and have not been reviewed, endorsed, or approved by any of these entities.
2 comments
This is the standard DL response to any meltdown or operational mess. Here’s two free tickets to make it better. Just spoke to a friend in operations control there who said this is probably the 5th time in his 15 years they’ve gotten this.
Your comment about …the priority here will bump them ahead of paying customers is inaccurate. Employees with these free tickets will be able to book any seat just like a paying customer would be able to book. Also, such tickets typically have some black out dates or inventory controls to manage the financial hit.