As a professional speaker, consultant, and facilitator, I travel a lot, so that means numerous airplane rides each month. Since I live in Georgia, I am a Delta Frequent Flyer and have well over a million miles on Delta.
Today I got to the Louisville, KY airport early enough to catch the flight to Atlanta prior to the gate closing. I asked if there was an extra seat and there was! I make it a point to always go if you can go — you never know what may happen with weather and equipment on the subsequent flight. The gate agent asked me about seats and seemed to be booking the change. Then she stopped and said, “It will cost $50.”
I was initially stunned into a non-response (for those of you that have read my book Grounded, this is not the type of response that I ascribe to). It turns out that you have to have the Gold status on Delta, and, at the moment, I am a lowly Silver. But just this week, Delta had had a fire in their Atlanta center that controls all the computer systems for booking and flying planes. Thousands of flights and hundreds of thousands of people had been delayed and inconvenienced. While I didn’t fly on Monday or Tuesday, the two biggest days the outage affected, my flight on Wednesday was delayed due to the domino nature of the issue.
Today, there was a plane where already everyone that had a ticket to board had boarded, and there were open seats. I had a paid ticket for the next flight, and I just wanted to get on this flight. What possible reason would Delta have to charge me $50? Did it really cost them anything to allow me to fly early? Wouldn’t it make sense to fill up a plane so that just in case there was an issue on the later flight or if someone wanted to buy another seat they would be able to do so? Wouldn’t they want a Million Miler who had been inconvenienced just this week to be able to board the earlier flight (especially one that writes a blog!)
I am not against fees. Organizations need to charge fair fees for the services they provide, but my ticket for this round trip was nearly $700. I had paid my fare, and this extra $50 just seems punitive. I know that running an airline can be a tough business in which to make money, but charging punitive fees just because you can does not seem to align with Grounded thinking. And to top it all off, Delta is no longer running the tongue-in-cheek safety videos anymore. Just a bummer all around…