Starting bright and early, Delta customers, affected by the system shutdown, had to wait and wait some more in a long lines to get to the ticketing desk so they could rebook their flights. In the first several hours after the outage, when planes were grounded, Delta’s website and other systems showed flights as being on time.
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Nationally, the airline canceled almost 250 flights Tuesday and about 1,000 on Monday.
“I apologize for the challenges this is creating for you with your travel experience”, Bastian said in a video posted on the company’s website. The company has been offering refunds and $200 (£154) vouchers to passengers whose flights are cancelled or delayed by more than three hours.
The company said via Twitter that it had cancelled about 300 flights due to the power outage. Instead of staying home or poolside at a hotel until the troubles blew over, many passengers only learned about the quagmire only after they passed through airport security.
While about half of Delta’s 18 inbound flights to Charleston were delayed Monday, there were no local cancellations for the airport’s largest carrier.
This incident comes just a few weeks after an outage at Southwest Airlines led to the cancellation of about 2,300 flights over four days. In a statement, Georgia Power said the company experienced an “equipment failure” that caused the outage.
Lisa, who’s flight to Atlanta was canceled this morning, went up to the desk and was told she had to get on the phone with Delta’s customer service. The investigation of the outage is ongoing, but Banstetter said that there is no indication that the problems were caused by a hack or intentional breach of the system.
Ryan Shannon, whose flight from Lexington, Kentucky, on Monday was delayed, said passengers boarded, were told to exit, waited about 90 minutes, then got back on the plane and flew to NY without further incident.
The carrier booked inconvenienced travelers on other airlines in select cases but largely accommodated them on its own flights, spokesman Michael Thomas said. United Airlines and American Airlines both suffered outages a year ago – United has struggled with several meltdowns since combining technology systems with merger partner Continental Airlines. The glitch also knocked the carrier’s automated kiosks offline during that period, forcing ticket-counter agents to manually check-in many Delta’s Monday morning customers. In Tokyo, a dot-matrix printer was resurrected to keep track of passengers on a flight to Shanghai.
Industry consultants say airlines face an increasing risk from computer disruptions as they automate more of their operations, distribute boarding passes on smartphones and outfit their planes with Wi-Fi. Others took it in stride.
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“There is always a delay, or weather, or something”, he said. “I travel weekly, so I’m used to it”, Shannon said with a laugh.
