I’ve long had an unhealthy fascination with airline schedule change policies. I think it’s because they tend to reflect the personality of the airline itself in funny ways. But ever since the Department of Transportation pushed through new rules on refunds, Delta’s policy has stood out for being the complete and total opposite of what people think when they fly Delta. It is unfair to the traveler, and I imagine that this will drive up volume to the call center where a sympathetic agent should override it with regularity. This is not the kind of behavior the airline should be trying to incentivize.
When I talk about different personalities, let me explain. American’s policy is completely overwritten. If I print it out, it will use 28 pages of paper. It’s very detailed yet somehow it’s also impressively confusing and frustrating to navigate.
United’s policy starts out simpler. It looks good on the surface and it talks a good game, but then there are all sorts of footnotes and gaps in the policy that make it not quite as good as you’d thought it was at first blush.
Then there’s Delta. Delta’s old policy was vague and relaxed. Basically, you could do just about anything you wanted within reason. I found that if I had any real question about whether I could do something, then the excellent sales support team would approve it. In general, you knew Delta would just allow the right thing to be done.
That was the old Delta. The new policy went into place at the end of October 2024. It aligned itself with the DOT’s mandate that airlines had to provide refunds due to disruptions for a variety of reasons. These are:
- A flight cancellation
- An earlier departure or later arrival of 180 minutes (3 hours) or more for domestic itineraries and 360 minutes (6 hours) or more for international itineraries
- Departing from or arriving at a different airport than originally scheduled
- A change in the routing which adds one or more stops to the original itinerary
- A downgraded to a lower class of service
- A flight number change
- A change in operating airline
- Any change that causes a missed connection
Most of these rules make sense with the exception of the flight number change. That, however, is not Delta’s fault. DOT required it, so if you have any flight number change, you can get a refund even though that is absurd.
But getting a refund is not the issue here anyway. All airlines have standardized around these points for refunds even though they are now worse than they were before DOT chimed in. (Delta used to allow refunds for a schedule change of more than 2 hours on any itinerary.) The real issue is that Delta has now taken this and made it not only the rule for refunds but also the rule for changes. That’s particularly problematic with the 3 and 6 hour rules.
As Delta says in its current policy before listing all those reasons I mentioned above:
To qualify for a complimentary change, the schedule change or irregular operation must meet one of the following guidelines
This makes no sense, and it’s unfair to travelers. The other big airlines realize this.
- Alaska travelers have nearly carte blanche for changes over 1 hour
- American allows many changes if the time moves between 16 minutes and an hour, but travelers have nearly carte blanche for changes over an hour
- Southwest travelers have nearly carte blanche for any change
- United allows most changes if the time moves between 30 minutes and 1 hour 59 minutes, but travelers have nearly carte blanche for changes of 2 hours or more
Even Spirit will let travelers adjust flights if there’s a schedule change of over an hour. (It even still allows refunds when that happens!) But not Delta.
We’ve run into this at Cranky Concierge a fair bit lately with Delta’s plentiful schedule changes. For example, we have a traveler who had booked a two hour layover in Atlanta traveling from home to somewhere in Europe. Delta shortened that to a one hour layover by moving the first flight forward by an hour. The traveler was nervous that this was too short, but based on the policy, that doesn’t matter. He was not eligible for a free change to a longer connection.
Now, this is still Delta. We called up sales support and the agent on the phone said she would enter some additional documentation in the reservation to allow us to move the traveler to the next earlier flight from his hometown which left a more comfortable 3 hour layover. (And by that, I mean a more comfortable layover for him. Everyone has a different comfort level which is why some book shorter or longer layovers in the first place.)
That’s good that sales support will still help, but this should be something that can be easily handled by the travel agent without help. Presumably the stated policy also means that free changes won’t be offered online for travelers looking to use self-service on delta.com. If nothing else, this will just anger travelers and force more volume into the call centers. I don’t get it.
I reached out to Delta for comment, but it did not have any statement regarding this other than confirming that it is “in full compliance with the U.S. Department of Transportation’s rule requiring automatic passenger refunds when a flight is canceled or significantly delayed….” That, of course, isn’t the question at hand, but maybe somebody will read this post and consider fixing this policy.
Remember how last week on The Air Show I updated what I learned about Spirit’s debt position in bankruptcy? Yeah, that was wrong too. Come listen to this week’s episode for the correction and stay for our main story, a look at Canada and Mexico demand.
Listen on Spotify
Listen on Apple Podcasts
Listen on Amazon
Listen on Pocket Casts
