Late Tuesday night rumors began to circulate that Delta CEO Ed Bastian and other high-level executives were flying to Paris to attend the opening ceremonies of the Olympic Games. The Atlanta based carrier is a major sponsor and the official airline of Team USA. The airline has also been a major supporter of bringing the olympic games to Los Angeles in 2028 and Salt Lake CIty in 2034.
It has since been confirmed by Delta that Bastain traveled to Paris via a regularly scheduled Delta flight, arriving on Wednesday July 24th. In a statement obtained by ATX Jetsetter, Delta stated:
“Ed delayed this long-planned business trip until he was confident the airline was firmly on the path to recovery. As of Wednesday morning, Delta’s operations were returning to normal. Ed remains fully engaged with senior operations leaders.”
While a few airline executives flying to a major sporting event wouldn’t normally make the news, Delta has had a far from normal week. An issue with an IT vendor caused airline systems around the world to go down early Friday morning which made a busy travel weekend even more chaotic.
Most airlines were back up and running over the weekend but Delta’s operation went into a full blown meltdown, stranding hundreds of thousands of passengers and cancelling thousands of flights over a five day stretch.
Throughout the ordeal, the airline has repeatedly blamed the incident on the IT vendor even though they are the only airline still experiencing issues. The recovery operation seems to have turned a corner as of Tuesday evening with cancellations hovering around 500 flights and delaying 1600 more.
The Optics Here are Bad
While I have no issue with airline executives attending a major event that they have promoted so heavily like the Olympics, the optics for this couldn’t be worse. We didn’t hear anything from Bastian for more than two days until a message was posted on the Delta News Hub this morning.
Prior to that, the most recent communication from the airline came from the public release of an internal memo which, while good for employee morale, provided no information to affected passengers.
While it isn’t on the same scale as the Olympics, the airline cancelled scheduled appearances at EAA AirVenture in Oshkosh, and indefinitely postponed an announcement originally scheduled for July 22nd.
The United States Department of Transportation (USDOT) has also launched an investigation into the meltdown and Secretary Buttigieg is vowing to take action.
You shouldn't be forced to sleep on the floor of an airport or stranded without access to customer service help.⁰⁰We are taking action to investigate Delta for its treatment of passengers.⁰https://t.co/x1rM4CZhyk
— Secretary Pete Buttigieg (@SecretaryPete) July 24, 2024
Operations Returning to Normal
The good news is that the airline seems to have finally gotten its operations back up and running. As of 12:00p ET only 47 flights have been cancelled and roughly 400 more are delayed. These numbers are below American’s total number of cancelled and delayed flights on the day.
With the operation back up and running, now the task will shift to reuniting passengers with lost luggage and getting stranded passengers where they need to go as quickly as possible. In the statement earlier today, Bastian stated that the airline expects to be fully recovered and operational by Thursday.
With travel waivers extended out for rebooking through August 4th, we’re still roughly a week and a half away from the cleanup portion of this meltdown. Certainly Delta will do an investigation around what went wrong and work to rectify this in the future.
Summary
Delta Chief Executive Officer Ed Bastian flew to Paris on a regularly scheduled Delta flight, arriving Wednesday morning. In a statement from Delta, it noted that the trip was postponed until he was confident that the operation was returning to normal. In a statement released by Bastain on Wednesday, he noted that they expect the operation to be fully recovered by Thursday.
(Image courtesy Delta Air Lines)
Don’t worry, today DL is offering free 10 minute massages in various conference rooms at headquarters. Employees only.
Surely you can’t be serious.