How To Survive When All The Flights Are Cancelled
When I arrived at Bradley Airport in Hartford this past Friday, I arrived to find a sea of blinking, dead screens all across the terminal. I’ve gone through flight delays and cancellations my entire life, mostly related to bad weather, but I had never seen anything as catastrophic as this. Seems like even the strongest hurricane could never match the power of a botched software update.
It wasn’t just BDL – the CrowdStrike outage significantly affected flights worldwide. The issue stemmed from a defective content update for CrowdStrike’s Falcon driver software, which caused widespread disruptions in IT systems across various industries, including airlines. Several major U.S. airlines, including Delta, American Airlines, United, and Spirit, experienced delays and cancellations due to the outage. For instance, Delta paused its global flight schedule and faced severe disruptions at its main hub in Atlanta, where 13% of departures and 19% of arrivals were canceled.
Many flight carriers were able to recover smoothly by the end of the weekend, except for Delta, whose cancellations stretched on for another five days of misery. South Korean mega-star IU was left stranded in Atlanta after Delta cancelled her flight, so she had to drive ten hours overnight in order to make her next concert.
I thought I had escaped the carnage until Sunday, when en route to my convention panel, Delta informed me that my flight had been cancelled. I attempted to use their app to reschedule, but when I hit the “Reschedule” button, the app immediately crashed. It slowly dawned on me that I was (to use the technical term) screwed.
So if your flight gets cancelled due to a worldwide software glitch, what can you do?
Know Your Passenger Rights
The Department of Transportation maintains a list of everything that US airlines provide in order to “mitigate passenger inconveniences”. You can check out their full Aviation Consumer Protection section as well. When you plan on contacting airlines to enforce your rights, make sure to keep careful documentation. You can take screenshots of your itinerary, record audio of your calls, and keep emails about your bookings. Photographing departure/arrival screens, baggage tags, and boarding passes is also a good idea. Many airlines also offer complimentary hotel stays and ground transportation for overnight cancellations, so keeping records of those receipts will be important for reimbursement later.
It’s always a good idea to keep essential items, like medication, valuables and toiletries, in a carry-on so that you’re never stranded without them.
Rebook Your Flight
After determining what your options are with the airlines, see if you can rebook your flight. In my case, Delta was beyond useless when trying to reschedule via the app, so I turned to other airlines. The cheapest flight out of the airport was on United, for over two thousand dollars (ouch!), so I began searching on FlightConnections and Seats.aero to see if I could use my points to pay for a same-day ticket.
If there are no options at your local airport, see if you can get to another airport. Hartford’s closest large airports are JFK and LaGuardia in New York City, as well as further up in Boston. Both are accessible via passenger rail, so I began looking for options to potentially take the train to the airport. The premium version of FlightConnections makes this easy by letting you draw a large radius around your area in order to catch all relevant airports, allowing you to see all possible connections home.
Use Travel Insurance
If you’re going anywhere, it’s important to have travel insurance for this exact situation. Premium credit cards offer trip delay and cancellation insurance, but they charge hefty annual fees and require you to book the trip directly on the card, so they’re not an option for everyone.
One of the top companies for this is SafetyWing, which offers both travel medical and general travel insurance. I’ve heard rave reviews for them over the years, so I reached out to ask what they offer for this type of situation. SafetyWing offers an unplanned overnight stay provision for food and accommodation expenses, up to $100 per day for a maximum of two days if your delay is 12+ hours and requires an overnight stay. Given that many travelers were stranded for multiple days, this is a fantastic benefit.
it’s important to note that the delay is calculated from your whole itinerary’s original arrival time to your actual arrival time, so while a delay may have only been an hour, if it caused missed connections, you could still be eligible for the benefit. Travel insurance is a great option for peace of mind, and the SafetyWing staff are easier to talk to and far more jovial than an overworked airline customer service agent.
If you’re looking to purchase travel insurance for an upcoming trip, SafetyWing even has a quote calculator you can use to estimate prices:
After an extended scramble, I managed to finally string some flights together in a last-minute award booking and fly to the Milwaukee airport, where my friends greeted me outside. Turns out that a Pokemon plushie serves as an excellent bribe for a midnight airport pickup request.
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