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.
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17 comments on “Delta’s Punitive Schedule Change Policy is Built to Be Ignored”
One of the best ways to make a good impression on a customer is to quickly & easily fix things when they go wrong or take an unexpected turn, especially when it isn’t the customer’s fault. Given how Delta tries to position itself as a more premium carrier, I’m surprised it doesn’t have a better process for the situation described above, especially as that may occur for customers flying in the premium seats on international flights.
Anecdotal, but I had a similar rebooking challenge on a B6 flight heading up the East Coast yesterday with a mx delay… Plane left the gate on time, but almost immediately taxiied back so that the mechanics could look at a mechanical (hydraulic pump) issue. They eventually had everyone deplane and started rolling delays, quickly ending up with a revised ETD of 4 hours after the original (actual time of departure was even later; surprised that flight wasn’t cancelled).
I tried to get rebooked to a on another flight, but (despite the fact that JetBlue’s policy explicitly permits this without fees or fare differences for 3+ hour delays), the gate agent said her supervisor wouldn’t allow her to change anyone’s flight without fees/fare differences, and the web site wouldn’t let me do it either. Eventually I had success using JetBlue.com’s chat function, getting a live person to move me to one of the last seats on another flight. I don’t begrudge the maintenance delay, but I was less than impressed with the way that B6 handled the rebooking situation, especially B6’s failure to ensure that its gate agents know JetBlue’s policies.
“A flight number change” — Yes, absurd, but it’s also a trap door in the Pax’s favor. Why do I suspect DL will “fix” that before the rest of the policy?
Dan – There is nothing to fix. This is the DOT rule.
And to those saying that this is good, I disagree. If the issue is changing aircraft configuration, then make that the trigger not flight number.
My experiences with AA were not an aircraft change or meaningful schedule change. The only thing that changed was the flight number, allowing them to wipe the seat assignments and insert a seat map with far more designated “preferred” seats (still regular main cabin seats, just upcharged for closer to the front, windows, aisles, etc.). Pure cash grab by AA.
They started doing this a lot in 2021 – happened to me 3 times that year. Glad DOT got ahead of it before it became an industry-wide thing.
Sorry to be a broken record on the flight number thing (I’m pretty sure I’ve commented about this before), but back in 2021 I was on the losing end of why this actually matters. A couple times AA changed a flight number on me without a meaningful schedule change (most notably when flying with my family of 3 from CLT-HNL) after I had already bought main cabin tickets and selected seats.
The flight number changes wiped out my original seat selections and of course when I went back to pick seats on the “new flight”, every desirable main cabin seat (all windows and most aisles) was now considered preferred and had a substantial upcharge so I had to pay up to reselect my old seats or accept middle seats much farther back. To keep our window-middle-aisle on the 10 hour CLT-HNL flight, it was suddenly going to cost $85 per seat.
Called AA about it and had an enrAAging conversation with an agent who insisted this was a new flight (THERE WAS EVEN A NEW FLIGHT NUMBER TO PROVE IT) and therefore seat assignments aren’t guaranteed to carry over. I hope they’re fined billions under this policy.
Yep. DOT was smart for closing this loophole for airlines to basically print money. It’s happening to me a few times (on AA mostly) & it’s infuriating. The seat selection fees are always higher after the flight number changes for some reason. Hmm…
To your point, a change in the type of plane (or any change that results in a pax not having the types of seats they were originally assigned on the original plane, such as exit row, extra leg room, window/middle/aisle, or similar) should probably be included in the rule, but I’m not sure how one would write the rule in a precise way.
On my JetBlue flight last night, the flight number stayed the same but a larger plane (A320 instead of A220) was swapped in on short notice (FlightAware still said it was an A220 and one of the flight attendants mentioned in conversation that she wasn’t scheduled to work but was called in at the last minute because the bigger plane needed another FA or two). That didn’t mess up my seat assignment/preference, as I didn’t get a seat assigned until the last minute, but it may have created headaches for other pax.
That might get really bad this year when USCanada flight consolidations likely happen soon. SIX HOURS!!!
CF,
How does all of this come into play when a flight is moved to a partner? The few times that this has happened to me it has caused me some angst.
Angry Bob – That’s a change in operating carrier and that does trigger it.
What happened to the old “KISS” (“Keep It Simple Stupid”) principle? I’m beginning to think that laws and regulations are mainly written to give lawyers something to litigate, not to benefit the public. LOL (I’m trying to be a bit facetious)
One of my June DL flight’s arrival time moved 4 minutes, and Delta’s app is allowing me to change for free as long as the new flight departs within 2 days of the original departure date.
Do they have a different policy for people with status, or for some specific market(SEA)? Or is it because we got a change that was going to cause miss connection on our outbound flight, and the policy got applied to the inbound flight as well even if they’re booked under a separate reservation?
Leol – I wish I could tell you the answer, but I don’t know. When I was talking to the Delta spokesperson last night, she told me that she assumed that the automation would follow the travel agent rules, meaning the website would behave that way. But she had no other information but it is a black box for me. I don’t know what they are doing there.
My experience with Alaska and American is that schedule changes happen much less now than they did pre-pandemic. I don’t know if there’s any way to research that, but schedules seem to be set much earlier than they used to. It used to be if you bought tickets more than two months out you could pretty much guarantee you’d get a schedule change and be able to change to your preferred flights. That hasn’t been me experience in the last couple years.
Curiosity question: does the DOT rule on “departing or arriving at a different airport…” completely ban the practice of airlines declaring airports as “coterminous”?
Many years ago, I was booked on DL to fly from JFK to TPA on Christmas Eve Day with a delightfully screwy routing of JFK-ORF-ATL-TPA, with the mainline portions in First. When I got to JFK, the JFK-ORF flight had been cancelled and the rude agent* gave me an itinerary with a standby flight to TPA eight hours later, with a confirmed backup even later…but into MCO.
When I asked about this, the agent told me that Delta considered MCO and TPA coterminous, and that they would not provide ground transportation from MCO to TPA. Except for either (a) a bus, (b) a single Amtrak train a day, or (c) a stultifying expensive car service ride, you cannot get from Orlando to Tampa without a car, and it being Christmas Eve I was afraid the car rental at MCO wouldn’t honor my TPA reservation. I asked for a reroute to SRQ (my brother lives in Bradenton) and was told “no” and that if I asked anything else I’d be flying after Christmas.
Eventually I made the stand-by flight (but no first class even though they were upgrading SkyMiles elites at the gate. Didn’t get my miles back either).
Can they still do this?
* – for some reason I have never had even a slightly pleasant groundside agent with DL at JFK. Gate agents = great.
CraigTPA – Nothing stops an airline from continuing to offer that. I imagine it was the closest they could get you to home. But you don’t have to accept it. You can tell them get me to my home airport or give me my money back. But of course, if you want your money back, then you just have to find your own way home.
Not interested in my witty posts anymore, Mr. Cranky? LOL
That’s OK I understand that you want to protect the people who kiss your ass.