family of 5 stuck at new york for over 24 hrs
 

my wife and sister in law with 3 kids arrived at jfk on saturday jan 3rd at 3.00 pm. they had a conecting flight for houston. that flight was delayed and delayed and evantually they were bumped from that flight at 11.00 pm . they were given hotel very late night and promised a flight in the morning. next day they were given tkts to houston with 1 stop. that flight was also delayed. then they were given seats on continental to houston. At the continental counter they were told they do not have seats. right now they are again waiting in line at delta counter. it is over 24 hours with no end in sight. it is very frustrating and once they get home I will pursue all avenues including a law suit , so the airline will be more carefull in future and some other poor family can avoid this situation.

jawed sawani
jawedsawani at yahoo.com

I don't know what you were told by your wife and sister-in-law but Continental doesn't have a counter @JFK because they do not fly out of JFK. If they were at JFK and sent to the Continental counter they were sent to either LaGuardia or Newark.

You also never mentioned the reason for the delay.

When you say they were "bumped" do you mean the flight actually departed and they were denied boarding due to an oversell? Or were they on stanby for that flight and did not clear? Or was the flight canceled?

Please get your facts straight and post the real story.

Thanks.

they were taken to laguardia on sunday morning. and by bumped i mean the flight actualy departed and they were denied due to oversell.

apologize for not stating these in the initial post


they are still at the airport as stand by on the 7.20pm flight. they are told that if 15 people donot show up on that flight than they will have seats. if not than they will be spending another night in new york

huh?
 

Geez, PHXFlyer, you just had to ask, didn't you? ;) Now I'm even more confused. If it's a family of five, why do they have to wait until fifteen don't show up? I can understand being bumped on the Continental flight...they probably were at the end of the list and didn't get seat assignments. Well, I sure hope they got out of Newark OK. Who was the original airline?

sounded like Delta was original carrier, if they were bumped from their scheduled flight, they should have been given involuntary denied boarding by Delta,unless they had misconnected in JFK(especially with the weather lately).Sounds like Delta didn't confirm the on Continental if they had rebooked them on Continental(by Delta).

Delta is really shafting these folks
 

I was interested in the outcome of this saga so I went to Continental's website to see if any stand-by passengers had been cleared for the 7:20PM flight from LGA-IAH only to find out CO doesn't have a 7:20PM. Yup, you guessed it - Delta sent these poor souls back to JFK. What's worse is their 7:20 PM from JFK-IAH is on a regional jet! So in Delta's opinion a party of five has a better chance on standby for an aircraft that has 60-67 seats in coach (depending on the configuration) vs. on a CO 737 from LGA-EWR which is served by the 500/700/800 series with 106/112/141 seats in coach respectively. Not to mention that IAH is CO's hub and they have way more non-stop frequency than DL.

The OP didn't say what the original reason for the denied boarding was, only that the flight was delayed and then left without them. However Delta's actions in this matter are definitely careless. When they announced the "merger" with Northwest they lauded it as the creation of a "premier global airline."

New York and Houston are certainly "major travel markets." Why can't DL get 5 passengers, 3 of whom are children, to their destination in less than 2 days?

Amazing how the airline can be so damn callous in their handling of this family. I would love to hear more from them...as to how they finally made it to their destination.

These poor souls shouldn't be on stand by for any flight, if they were on Delta's oversell. Shouldn't they have been given confirmed seats on the next flight? (meaning they would have to oversell the following flight to put them on) It's how United and continental do it.

Each airline (and each flight on that airline) has it's own authorization limit for oversell which is set by their revenue management department. If the next several flights are already overbooked by that limit, they will only confirm on the next flight that is below that limit but put you on stand-by for the next flight regardless of it's oversale status. As this was a party of 5 (not a reference to the old Fox series) they could only have been booked on the next flight which was 5 or more below it's max. authorization. Sometimes in this situation they will ask if the family wants to split up sending some on an earlier flight and some later.

I'm not sure how United does it but I'm very familiar with Continental (although since CO is switching to Star Alliance later this year I have a feeling I'm going to get to know the "ins-and-outs" on UA) and as they roll the stand-by list those who have been on stan-by the longest towards the top of the list after their OnePass Elite passengers.

my family of 5 finally got home on monday early morning at 12:15 am. they were given stand by seats on 7.20 pm flight on sunday from jfk. which was delayed for about 2 hrs. they were told that there is a good chance that they wont be able to get on that flight so they were booked on a later flight to atlanta. then staying the night there thaey had seats on an afternoon flight to houston. Luckily they were able to get seats on the sunday night flight. needles to add that we wont be using delta airlines ever again