As Delta cancellations continue, here are your passenger rights
MINNEAPOLIS — As Delta Air Lines works to get back on track after it canceled hundreds of flights over the weekend, customers are left wondering how they can get reimbursed if they are left stranded at the airport. According to flight aware — 77 flights were canceled at MSP as of noon on Tuesday. All but one are with Delta.
Some travelers on Tuesday said they've been able to re-book, but not until the next day. In some cases, with multiple connections turning a two-and-a-half-hour flight into a 12 hour travel day.
"It's been an experience. We don't fly very often. So, hopefully the next flight goes better," said Delta traveler Dennis Schmitz.
"We're going to see what options we have, but we might end up just having a good day in Minneapolis I guess," said traveler Nickolas Olt.
One family moving state turned in their apartment keys, and then had to find a hotel because their flight was canceled.
"This is ugly, this is about as bad as it gets for an airline," said Kyle Potter with Thrifty Traveler. "When an airline cancels or significantly delays a flight, you are entitled to a refund, not just a travel credit, or a voucher but getting your money back."
The airline is under investigation by the U.S. Department of Transportation as it continued to scrap hundreds of flights Tuesday, five days after a faulty software update from the cybersecurity system CrowdStrike took down Microsoft systems across the globe.
Overall, Delta had canceled more than 5,500 flights since the outage started early Friday, according to aviation-data provider Cirium. On Tuesday as of 10 a.m., Delta had canceled 446 flights and delayed 636 for the day, far exceeding cancellations by any other U.S. airline, according to data from flight tracker FlightAware. Of those 446 canceled flights, 67 had impacted Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport.
Travel experts say that keeping a record of expenses is one of the best ways to increase the odds of getting reimbursed.
"Keep all your receipts and submit them all to Delta — even if you're not sure if they will cover them, try to bill them for every dime," said executive editor of Thrifty Traveler Kyle Potter.
In addition to keeping receipts, Potter recommended looking into any travel insurance a customer might have purchased, or the benefits of a travel credit card a customer could have used.
He added that the reimbursements would take time; Southwest Airlines took "weeks, if not months," he said, to process all requests following the meltdown over Christmas of 2022 which left more than 2 million travelers stranded.
"Travelers hoping to be made whole by Delta are going to have to be patient," Potter said. "But don't take no for an answer."
After the Southwest Airlines fiasco, the U.S. Department of Transportation announced a series of new rules to give passengers more rights and flexibility.
The first rule mandates that airlines promptly refund customers the full ticket price when flights are meaningfully disrupted or delayed. The rule also clarified the meaning of a "delay" to be three hours for a domestic flight and six hours for an international flight. Previously, it was left to the discretion of the airline.
However, there is still no effective date for when the rules apply.
In addition to Delta, United Airlines was the next-worse performer since the onset of the CrowdStrike outage, canceling nearly 1,500 flights total.
