Travel agent reacts to IT outage, Delta Airlines slow bounce-back

By 7:00 AM Wednesday, Delta Airlines had already canceled 1% of its flights and delayed 6% .

Delta was one of the major airlines affected by Friday’s IT outage caused by Crowdstrike. While American and United recovered through the weekend, Delta struggled to get back in the the air. + On Tuesday, NBC News reported the airline canceled 400 flights, and 2/3 of its flights had been delayed or canceled since Friday.

Liane Lance is a travel agent for Picture This Travel. She said her Friday was filled with helping clients affected by the outage. She admits there isn’t much that can be done outside of the normal when it is this widespread.

Steve Silvestri/KSHB

“The hard part is getting hold of somebody to help you. And if you're if you're talking to your travel agent, there's only so many things we can do on the day of travel. And it depends whether we all have GDS systems or not and whether those systems can be used to rebook if the flights are available,” said Lance. “You couldn't trust any of the schedules that were being published, especially by Delta, because they were rebooking people on flights, only to find out a few hours later the client would get a cancellation notice.”

Another issue brought up by travelers and Lance was that the airlines’ mobile apps were not working properly and phone lines were clogged with people trying to reschedule or get a refund.

Steve Silvestri/KSHB

Lance said one thing she ensures her clients don’t travel without is travel insurance, especially for international travel.

“That means whether you're going to Mexico or whether you're going to Europe. So travel insurance is going to give you things like trip interruption, trip delay, misconnections. It will give you coverage for that. So, for example, we don't know yet whether the people that had to spend one or 2 nights in a hotel or more because of this outage, we don't know whether that's going to be covered yet under trip interruption or trip delay,” said Lance.

The Federal Department of Transportation recently rolled out new rules giving fliers more rights . The DOT requires airlines to give you a refund if your flight is canceled, along with if it is delayed by more than three hours for domestic flights or six hours for international. That also covers third-party bookings. Airlines are also required to give travelers a cash refund if lost baggage is not returned within 12 hours.