The tickets have fewer restrictions than the typical airline employee perk
After days of dealing with logistical chaos and upset customers, Delta Air Lines is rewarding its employees for how they handled the CrowdStrike $CRWD technology outage that disrupted the carrier’s operations for the better part of a week. The Atlanta Constitution-Journal reports that Delta is giving each employee two free plane tickets good for anywhere the company flies.
“I know it’s been extremely difficult, and I’m deeply sorry for what you have endured,” CEO Ed Bastian reportedly wrote in a company-wide memo. An operational disruption of this length and magnitude is simply unacceptable — you and our customers deserve better. Your efforts throughout have been nothing short of heroic.”
Although many airline employees are typically able to fly anywhere free, these passes have fewer restrictions, dropping for instance a requirement that Delta workers only take standby seats. CNBC reports that group flight attendants seeking to unionize with the Association of Flight Attendants described the offer as a “meager adjustment” to the company’s operations instead of a more meaningful change. They had previously criticized Bastian for flying to Paris for the Olympics while many of them were still trying to figure out how to get back to business-as-usual.
The CrowdStrike outage, which started with a glitchy cybersecurity software update, affected Delta’s internal computer systems more seriously than other airlines. It was cancelling hundreds of flights days after other carriers’ troubles had subsided. Bastian said the incident had cost Delta $500 million.
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