Travel has been making something of a comeback lately. As the pandemic has ebbed, and as people have begun to return to whatever “normal life” looks like, at this point, a lot of them are more willing to get on an airplane than at any point over the last two years.
Of course, anytime you run a business as complex as an airline, There are–literally–thousands of moving parts. Sometimes things break. Sometimes pilots get sick. Sometimes it rains in New York City, which somehow prevents all airplanes basically everywhere from getting where they’re supposed to be. things are going to go wrong.
All of those things cause delays. Sometimes the delays are bad enough that they become cancellations.
If your job is running a massive network that involves packing hundreds of people onto flying metal tubes and ferrying them from one place to another, canceling a large number of those flights is one of the biggest challenges you have to deal with.
That’s basically what happened over Memorial Day weekend. Thousands of flights were canceled during what was the busiest travel period in the last few years. Those cancelations continued as airlines try to match their capacity to the surge in demand.
Flight cancellations, as unfortunate as they are, are a part of running an airline. Things are going to go wrong. What matters is how you respond when they do.
I traveled earlier this month and got to experience a canceled flight firsthand. Thankfully, I was able to change my itinerary and still get home. The difference was, instead of a direct, 80-minute flight, I now had two flights, two hours each, with a three-hour connection in the middle.
Still, it wasn’t the end of the world. I would describe it as a “moderate inconvenience.” That’s why what happened next was so unexpected. After my flight, I received the following email from Delta with the subject “Our Sincerest Apologies:”
We apologize again for the disruption to your travel, as providing reliable, best-in-class customer…