[JoDub]

I booked two tickets with Delta 3 months ago, and the flight leaves a week from today. This morning I received a voice mail message telling me to contact Delta as my flights had changed. I am currently on the phone with them (on hold, of course) and am approaching the two-hour mark of my phone time with them. Yikes!

What I have discovered is that Delta has a policy that if they change a flight time, if the new time is not convenient for the passenger, a $100 change fee must be paid for each ticket unless the time difference is more than 90 minutes. Since my time difference was only 75 minutes I would have to pay a change fee for a new flight. When I was informed of this I asked them to please let me know where this policy was published as I had never seen it. After a brief time on hold, the rep came back to tell me that it's not published anywhere for the public to see, it's just an internal Delta policy. SERIOUSLY?! So now Delta thinks that secret policies are fair to their customers? Since I will have a young child with me on this cross-country flight AND I was already the last flight in by an hour and a half for a meeting with people arriving from 6 different states, an extra 75 minutes is a very big deal to me and the others involved.

I'm now on the phone (on hold, of course) with a supervisor in Delta's Tampa, FL call center, and it appears that she will be able to accomodate me without a charge. It's taking me over 2 hours of calm discussions, sweet talk, and transfers to supervisors to get this done, but it's worth it for $200. Now, if there was only a way to get them to change this secret policy... Delta must make a killing off of people who aren't willing to jump through hoops to avoid this charge. At the VERY least, this should be published somewhere so that their customers will be aware before it happens.

[PHXFlyer]

You may have initially been connected to one of Delta's infamous off-shore call centers. Apparently they aren't empowered to do anything that's "off the script" to include waiving fees, HOWEVER when a schedule change is made and the departure and/or arrival time is no longer convenient there should be NO FEES charged to change your itinerary to times that work better for you. That is why when pressed they could not point to a published rule about the 90 minutes because it was total crap!

I too have had the occasional scrape with the contract call centers. They are not Delta employees so have no vested interest in providing anything more than barely adequate levels of customer service. I wouldn't be surprised if they get incentives for collecting fees eithng er. I was trying to make changes to a refundable ticket and the agent working in the Montego Bay call center wanted to charge me a change fee and wouldn't budge on the issue. After some time I gave up and told him to simply refund the ticket and I'll just re-book the new dates online. He then had to transfer my call stateside (which I had already asked him to do) because apparently they aren't allowed to refund tickets - even those they know to be refundable. Amazing!

Anyway, I'm glad Delta finally did what they were supposed to do in the first place. If this ever happens again try this. While going through the prompts at the beginning of the call answer as if you want to change an international ticket even though you are calling about a domestic ticket. Your probability of being routed to a stateside call center the first time is much higher. Also if after being denied several times mention that you'll be sending a complaint to the DOT. That sometimes wakes them up!