Some parents say they were left scrambling to help their stranded kids after Delta Air Lines suddenly changed its policies as it grapples with extended delays and cancellations that stretched into the fourth day.
“It was about three hours of sheer panic,” one of the parents, Cecilia Stone, told Business Insider.
Delta has axed more than 5,000 flights in the past five days, and Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg announced on X that the agency had opened an investigation into the airline to ensure it was “taking care of its passengers.”
After the outage, Delta barred unaccompanied minors from traveling, a move its competitors have not implemented.
The airline initially paused unaccompanied minor travel through Sunday, The New York Times reported, but the company posted on its website that kids can’t fly alone through Tuesday.
Frustration and panic
Joel Fortney, a serial entrepreneur and loyal Delta customer, said his 12-year-old daughter wasn’t able to fly back home to Iowa after a two-week stay at summer camp in Maine on Friday.
The daughter remained calm as Fortney frantically tried to get his daughter home. “Ultimately, I had a 12-year-old just kind of floating,” he told BI.
Fortney’s daughter was able to stay overnight at a hotel with some of her camp counselors, he said, and then he rebooked her on a United flight to Chicago the next day — where he and his wife drove six hours to pick her up.
Fortney was able to get a refund for the unused portion of the Delta ticket, but said he “going to be shopping” for other airlines in the future.
“I would never want this to happen to another family,” he said. “It felt like a uniquely Delta decision and it really impacted people in a way that just didn’t make any sense.”
Stone, 39, said her son — a 17-year-old Navy Sea Cadet — was also stuck while trying to fly from a Salt Lake City training camp to his home in San Diego on Saturday.
Donald had a regular ticket, but as a minor was still not allowed to fly, Stone told BI. She said Delta didn’t notify her of the change; she found out when her son called her after he couldn’t check-in to his flight.
Stone immediately began calling other airlines, she said, none of which had any flights.
Hours later, Stone was able to find a Southwest flight to San Diego that evening.
“It was just incredibly frustrating,” she said. “It boggled my mind that [Delta] thought that that was okay.”
Delta told Business Insider in a statement that it stopped unaccompanied kids from traveling “to protect minors from being separated from their families and caregivers in the event of flight disruptions or cancellations.”
“We take seriously the trust caregivers place in us with their children’s travel, and sincerely apologize that that trust was compromised through confusion around the embargo,” the airline said, adding teams were working to keep customers updated and to make things right for affected customers.
Stone said she hasn’t received a refund yet. She plans to “steer clear of Delta Airlines altogether” in the future.
