How It Took Me Two Years To Get $110 From Delta

Photo by Ryan Johns on Unsplash.

I grew up in a home with extremely, extremely thrifty parents and because of that, I am fairly money conscious. When I was younger, my mom took it up as a personal crusade to get every penny from the insurance company. She would sit for hours on the bench of our kitchen table, hunched over papers and politely but firmly letting the representative know they she had once again not been refunded for a prescription and that she was owed $35.17. She would be transferred between various departments as each would adamantly claim that X had not been completed or Y had not been filed when in reality, she had completed X, filed Y, and had the proof sitting in front of her. It wasn't that she wasn't busy; my parents both worked full-time jobs while raising me and my three siblings. But she knew that corporations created these needlessly complex systems in order to dissuade hard working people from getting what had been promised to them. These corporations relied on exasperated people hanging their heads in defeat and giving up after yet another set of documents was "lost" or "misfiled". She waged a personal crusade and got every penny that was owed to us.

Was it worth it in the end? I don't know. But watching her go war, I couldn't help but admire her resolve. What follows is a painfully accurate and closely documented journey as I try to match her resolve.

April 11th, 2022

Dashlane, one of my previous employers, scheduled a meet and greet with the team I had recently joined as a Remote Software Engineer. As with many smaller companies, we were in charge of getting our own flights and accommodations and then expensing them back to the company to later get reimbursed. Personally I love this flow since that means I can put all the charges on my card and get cash back/points for the purchases. On April 11th, 2022 I purchased a round-trip flight from Salt Lake City, UT to New York City, NY with Delta. Upon completing the online purchase, Delta presented me with a banner to purchase a room through their partner, Hotels.com. After clicking on the banner, I was taken to the Hotels.com site where I purchased an 8 night stay. I received an email confirmation in my inbox (some information removed for privacy).

The email had a delta banner, the number of miles I would earn, and even a "Delta confirmation number" so I felt pretty confident that Delta was aware of my purchase.

May 21st, 2022

The trip went off without a hitch and, while booking another trip three weeks later, I realized that I had not received the miles for my hotel stay. I suppose three weeks is not that long but I had a feeling something had gone wrong and so I filed a ticket with Delta that included details of the flight, the hotel booking, and all the confirmation numbers that I had. Upon submission, I got an email:

I was given two numbers, told not to reply to the email, and that it would be a long wait. No problem, I understand that sometimes things get lost in the mix and I am sure those customer service representatives are overworked and underpaid. Sadly, this was a pattern that I was about to see play out many, many times.

July 3rd, 2022

I had received no reply to my ticket and it had been over five weeks so I figured maybe a phone call would do the trick. After waiting on hold, the representative told me to file another ticket and then wait two to four weeks as it can take some time to process the request. No problem, these things take time, maybe I just followed up too quickly.

January 18th, 2023

Again, I had received no reply from Delta other than the original auto-response email. It had been about eight months since my original purchase and trip and I was beginning to feel extremely frustrated. There was no follow up action, no timeline provided, and no communication from Delta. I decided to call again and this is when I began tracking things in more detail.

I was on hold for 23 minutes (actually shorter than my previous hold time), I explained the situation to the customer service representative who told me that I needed Delta Vacations since I booked a hotel. This was my first time hearing about this but it sounded like progress so she transferred me over. I was put into their hold system for 46 minutes, I once again explained the situation to the new customer service representative who then informed me that no, this was not a Delta Vacations issue since I purchased through Hotels.com. I was transferred back but, of course, not to a representative but to a queue. I was then on hold for another 1 hour and 13 minutes. I once again explained the situation to a new customer representative for the third time. I was told to submit another ticket number and it would be handled in two to four weeks.

January 23th, 2023

I was determined not to let this slip through the cracks and followed up early. I was on the phone for 34 minutes, quietly reassured that they were handling it and that it would just take some time. It was clear that the status of any of the numerous tickets I had been told to submit had not been checked during the call.

February 15th, 2023

After ten months since my original purchase and nine months since my first contact about the issue, I received my first email back from Delta. Now my request gets to go sit in yet another queue with a "hotel liaison" but it felt like progress. I should have known better at this point.

March 28th, 2023

After not hearing anything back for five weeks (why did I expect this new queue to move any faster than the previous one? or for it to be more communicative?) I follow up with an email.

Believe it or not, I got an auto-response with, you guessed it, another ticket and case number.

I had not realized that the SkyMiles email I had received was not actually from a person but just from a general email. I thought I was beginning to get some personal attention to this matter when my request was moved to the hotel liaison. Instead, when I replied to the email asking for support and to take them up on the offer of "any additional questions, concerns, or need further assistance", I got plopped right at the back of the main support queue again.

May 17th, 2023

Fatigued, yet determined, I call Delta once again. I am on hold for 38 minutes and then I get disconnected during the call. No one calls back so I call again. I am on hold for 42 minutes. I am assured once again that "we have forwarded your request to our hotel liaison for review". Delta tries to call me back two hours later to reconnect from our disconnected phone call earlier, I guess that warrants some type of kudos? Why not an immediate call back though? They clearly had my number.

Later that night, I receive two emails. The first is to let me know that my original request from May 21st, 2022 (a year ago for those of you keeping score at home) has been forwarded to the hotel liaison yet again. Did the first one not make it?

Eight minutes after I received that email, I got another email from the same representative responding to my March 28th email when I asked if there was any progress. It had basically the same contents as the first email.

May 25th, 2023

I called once again to follow up on the status of the tickets. I was on hold for 1 hour and 29 minutes. The representative told me to call back in two weeks and it will be handled. I have never rolled my eyes harder at a statement.

June 8th, 2023

I called Delta once again. After being on hold for 49 minutes, I was connected to a customer representative who I tried to reason with. I explained that this had been an issue for over a year, I had numerous support tickets, and a very clear paper trail. I begged the woman on the phone to just give me the miles so I could stop wasting everyone's time. I was rebuffed of course.

She explained that there is a department for SkyMiles that, I was told, is impossible to be transferred to. It is an internal team only, they do not take outside calls, and all the mini-holds I was put on during my previous calls were when my representatives would ask questions to that department and then relay the answers to me. She told me that regular customer service agents like herself had no power to give miles. I asked if I could talk to a supervisor and that maybe they could authorize the miles. She said that it would not help and that only the SkyMiles department could give miles but that again, I had no way of getting ahold of them to ask. Instead, I would have to make a ticket.

Around the same time, I had taken another Delta flight. The TVs were not working and the stewardess advised us to submit a complaint to Delta and we would receive some miles as compensation. I figured I would submit two complaints, one for the broken TVs and one for my missing miles since maybe these complaints went to a different queue and this would be resolved faster.

July 15th, 2023

Five weeks later, Delta calls me to let me know they have credited me with 5000 miles due to the TVs not working on my previous flight. I ask about my other ticket but the representative doesn't know about that case, they are only calling about this one. I thank them for their time and the miles.

That took five weeks from submission to resolution. I checked the status of my other complaint.

My complaint about the missing hotel miles was closed with no communication, no reason, and no miles. I was livid at this turn of events. Somehow I was able to get 5000 miles for a TV not working for two hours on a flight but 9599 miles for something I paid for is asking just too much.

August 23rd, 2023

After stewing on the situation for a month, I finally decided to email Richard Cox, the SVP of Reservation Sales & Customer Care, in a Hail Mary pass. I hated doing it, it felt like I was trying to tattle, but I felt that I had exhausted all my other options.

As expected, I never heard back.

August 28th, 2023

Filled with a final breath of determination, I called Delta once again hoping to get any scrap of information that I could. I was on hold for 1 hour and 30 minutes after which I spoke to a representative for 15 minutes. Here is what I learned:

• Delta sends the information over to their hotel liaison
• The hotel liaison talks to the hotel to confirm the stay
• Once the stay is confirmed, the liaison passes the information back to the SkyMiles team
• The SkyMiles team then credits my account

According to the representative, the information was stuck with the hotel. How long had it been stuck with the hotel? I have no idea. Why had no one told me this before? I have no idea. Why had someone not simply called the hotel to check? I have no idea.

I dug up the hotel's information and called them. The call took 4 minutes. The worker there told me that they had changed management in March, about 6 months ago, and they have no records of any stays before then. Imagine if my hotel liaison tried to resolve my ticket back when I had gotten the hotel room a year and a half previous.

The worker at the hotel gave me the number for the old management company. That call also lasted 4 minutes. The old management company told me that they don't recognize the hotel name I was calling about and that they changed systems recently and lost all previous information. They also couldn't (or rather wouldn't) give me the contact information for the hotel liaison.

With everything turning into a dead end because Delta had stalled so long on the issue and too much time had passed, I wrote a final note in my records: "August 28th, 2023, I admit defeat on this issue."

January 1st, 2024

At 4:56 PM, I received an email from Delta.

After almost two years, I received the miles for my trip. The email chain this message was attached to referenced my original ticket from May 21st, 2022 when I submitted my first support ticket. At least they said sorry for taking two years to get back to me, right? And they even gave me one extra mile for my troubles.

Conclusion

It had taken so long to get any information out of Delta that by the time I actually got something useful, it had been too long and time had changed too much. Delta was too busy giving me the runaround, telling me to file tickets and wait a month or two, hoping that it would get resolved or, at the very least, when I called back that they wouldn't get stuck with my issue. And the SkyMiles department has somehow siloed themselves from the outside world which meant that I got lucky when I finally ran into someone who knew a little about the inner workings and could tell me about the process.

I don't blame the customer server representatives for their inability to help me. It seems clear that there were corporate decisions that removed power from these frontline employees. My guess is that corporate probably felt one or two of them were giving out miles too liberally to placate angry customers and so the ability to give miles was moved to an internal team that was impossible to reach from the outside. I have almost no doubt that kicking the can down the road is more efficient and reflects better on a customer service representative than actually solving a problem for a customer. And that isn't the representative's fault, they are responding to the systems created for them at a corporate level. You may think that is a big assumption on my part but if representatives were rewarded for solving problems, my issue would not have been ignored for almost two years.

21 months, 11 different Delta employees, 10 support numbers, over 285 minutes on the phone, and 4 emails for $110 worth of miles.

Was it worth it in the end? I still don't know.