Tag: Travel

Delta CEO – Demand Bleak Call me crazy, but since I fly Delta more than I drive my own car, I have an opinion here. I am NOT seeing reduced demand between Orlando and Atlanta or Atlanta and Greensboro, my current back and forth. Delta has reduced the size of their planes some (some 757 vs. 767’s) into Orlando but even then, the flights are overbooked, sometimes by as many as 40 people. Yesterday I flew home on a fully loaded, stuffed to the gills, place children in the overhead 767-400.

The 5:30am flight to Atlanta is full. All of the evening flights back to Orlando are full and my Greensboro flights are averaging about 90% full. An heaven knows I don’t get a seat at the Atlanta Airport Chili’s any faster than I used to.

My friends who fly back and forth from Tampa tell me same thing and getting in or out of Greensboro at the last minute is still a $1,000 ticket because you get the last seat on the plane.

I’d sure like to know where the demand softness is because it sure doesn’t seem to be in the south.

If you are sensitive, be careful. I’m going to say nice things about Delta, the airline, not the faucet. I give Delta an awful lot of grief and deservedly so, but when they get something right, I want to talk about that too.

Last Friday, Delta/ASA canceled my flight and I was trying to get home to get an hour or so with a client who is on the way home from the airport. The gate agent point out that an earlier flight was running late and hadn’t left yet. She booked me as a standby on that flight and set me up for an earlier flight home. All the pieces worked and they all worked without dropping me from a first class upgrade on the second flight. So to the all the Delta agents in Greensboro, NC., Thank You!

I made it to the client an hour earlier than expected and got home to the family earlier too.

Today, they managed to squeeze me out of my middle exit row seat and into an aisle seat in first class. I was the last upgrade, it was an evening flight and I was very grateful. So another big thank you to the gate agents for Delta flight 1033 out of Orlando on Sunday night.

I’m a Gold medallion member on Delta now and it looks like it’s going to be a Platinum year so it’s nice to know that there are days when everything works.

Oh, and Delta, thanks again for never putting me on a plane that chose to land in a river!