Posted on 06/11/2019 6:31:05 AM PDT by Hojczyk
A group of fifth graders from Oklahoma arrived at their Washington, D.C. field trip in style, touching down in the nation’s capital on a private Delta Air Lines flight after their American Airlines trip was canceled at the last minute.
On June 2, 41 fifth-grade students from Tulsa and their chaperones received the disappointing news that their American flight departing Will Rogers World Airport to Richmond, Va. for their highly anticipated school trip – which has been in the works for almost a year – was canceled, Though the carrier issued the group a refund, there were no alternative flights to D.C. available at the time, KOCO reports. Waiting it out at the airport for six and a half hours, the youngsters were soon back on their merry way – thanks to the generosity of two Delta gate agents who witnessed the exchange.
Contacting the airline’s headquarters in Atlanta, the staffers were able to coordinate for a spare aircraft to be flown to the Oklahoma City airport to ultimately transport the students to Richmond, the News reports.
"It was absolutely amazing when Delta corporate came in and just said, 'We’ll just give you the whole plane,’” one of the trip’s chaperones told local media.
“THANK YOU for getting this group of 5th graders out of OKC and onto Richmond Virginia on a private flight when @AmericanAir wanted to leave us stranded! Most amazing corporation to work with at 3:00am,” another trip chaperone echoed in agreement on Twitter, sharing a photo of some of the students and a Delta employee at the airport.
“It was an absolute pleasure to assist you in your time of need. We are glad that we were able to help with such an amazing group of kids!” reps for the carrier warmly wrote in reply.
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
Yeah that’s good press.
Nice story! Thanks for sharing.
Millions of dollars in free advertising at for under $100K! Those guys are pretty smart....
Man oh man did Delta just get tons of positive free press. Whoever in AA that allowed this to happen will be fired...
AA Sux. Wish we had a viable alternative in DFW.
Kudos to Delta for this. Well done!
Give those gate agents a bonus!
Fortunately, most of what flies out of OKC is United and Southwest. I am not a fan either of AA.
I am surprised they drove from Tulsa to Okc to fly AA to DC. That is a 2 hour drive. Tulsa would have had Southwest and United flights that would have taken them to DC through Houston or Chicago.
That's a weird thing for AA to do -- is there some SJW backstory to this?
You are so right. When Delta had more presence at DFW I would always fly Delta.
AA was typically arrogant to cancel that trip for the kids.
Outstanding press but also pretty amazing in these days of red tape and liability that starting with gate agents they were able to make the decisions and give permissions to do this as quickly as they did. That is what is really unusual about this.
Nice story.
Be interesting to see the press put a negative spin on this. You just know they will try.
Good move by Delta. You couldn’t BUY that much good publicity.
This is a great public relations move on the part of Delta. The next time the parents of these kids, as well as others at the school, are going to book a flight, guess who they’re going to choose? Guess who they’ll recommend to their friends?
It says they contacted corporate. Good on Delta for doing this. We had some bad flights on Delta and complained to the President. He looked up our complaint, saw it was genuine and issued a couple free tickets.
I live in Fayetteville, NC, which has an airport that links to Atlanta, then Chicago than Minneapolis/St Paul - then I have to drive 4 hours.
Or I can drive 1 1/4 hours to Raleigh, fly to Chicago, transfer and fly to Rochester, MN and drive an hour.
Sometimes the shortest first leg isn’t the fastest route.
I hate flying American, and Delta has (had) a reputation of being a nightmare to fly on.
Things like this go a long way. Long way.
Smart business.
You aren’t the first that Ive heard say that but its weird to me when I hear this. I haven’t flown regularly since the early 90s so Im sure things may have changed significantly but when I did fly I always chose AA if I could as they always treated me the best.
And that is called “earning the customers’ Goodwill.”
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.