NYC travelers faces days of frustration over Delta cancelations
NEW YORK (WABC) -- If you booked a vacation and flew Delta last weekend, going back to the office is probably less stressful.
One woman we spoke with hadn't slept in more than 24 hours.
She spent hours bouncing back and forth from area airports when she was supposed to be in Europe.
"Our flight took off two hours late. They told us that we were going to make our connection. It was going to be very tight and then when we got to JFK we sat on the runway for 40 minutes. And so they still told us we were going to make it if we ran for it," Jamie Paulen said.
Paulen from Raleigh was on her way to relaxing vacation in Iceland. Or so she thought, until the layover from hell at JFK.
It was midnight. She and her kids were the first ones off the plane. They sprinted to their connection.
"We got there and they just shut the gate. So they told us that I had to get in line. So I waited in line for 3 hours and they booked us on another flight but she didn't tell me that we were going to Newark. So I actually almost went to JFK," she said.
She's among the Delta Airlines customers living in a travel nightmare. The airline is struggling to bounce back from the Microsoft computer outage. The disruptions have dragged into the fifth day.
"My flight was supposed to be 6 o'clock this morning. I'm from Long Island and I was supposed to leave from JFK. I had to rebook to Philadelphia and now I'm here in Newark," Donyshia Boston-Hill said.
Other airlines got back to normal by the weekend but Delta had to cancel 1,100 flights on Monday, which was more than a quarter of its flights. Hundreds more were canceled on Tuesday. More than 7-thousand in all since Friday.
The airline's CEO says it will take a few more days to resolve the issues.
The U.S. Department of Transportation has launched an investigation into Delta Airlines, Secretary Pete Buttigieg says, "to ensure the airline is following the law and taking care of its passengers during continued widespread disruptions."
Delta says it is fully cooperating and working tirelessly to make it right for customers.
"There's been a lot of misunderstandings and a lot of issues with delta at this point," traveler Steve Mansor said.
Mansor would rather see less words, and more action from Delta. He was considering renting a car to drive back home to Detroit from Newark after his 1:00 p.m. flight was canceled.
"The only later flight that I saw was 8:20 and I don't want to risk having to stay at the airport because hotels are booked," Mansor said.
The outage happened on the busiest weekend of the summer for Delta. The airline says customers who've incurred hotel, meal, or transportation expenses may be eligible for reimbursement.
Delta's meltdown mirrors that of Southwest Airlines, which canceled nearly 17,000 flights over 15 days in December 2022. A Transportation Department investigation ended with Southwest agreeing to pay a $35 million fine as part of a $140 million settlement.
Southwest blamed its breakdown on a winter storm, but other airlines recovered in a couple days while Southwest did not. Consumer advocates see the same pattern with Delta this month - the airline continues to blame the CrowdStrike outage while rivals such as American recovered quickly, and even United Airlines, the second-worst at cancellations, was back on track Monday.
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Some information from the Associated Press
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