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Last weekend I flew home from St. Thomas and had something interesting happen that I don’t recall ever having happen to me in all my years of flying.
I got a schedule change notice that we were going to depart early just hours before the flight!
This was personally no big deal for me as I was already at the airport waiting in the mega big room that serves as the gate area for all the STT flights. But it got me thinking.
Delta tells us, domestically at least, that we need to be at the gate a minimum of 15 minutes before departure. But in my situation Delta moved the flight up by just that amount. Humm….
Now before readers jump all over me I know non-hub airports (and Caribbean in particular) are a bit unique and the attitudes are more, shall we say, relaxed. I have had countless flights where everyone was on-board and we pushed early. That is not what I am talking about. This one was different and an official “last minute schedule change” that we are going to fly early (so hurry up).
Also I should let you all know that once on-board we were all told that we were missing just one passenger. If I were the one now running late, after such a last minute change so close to flight, it would have been a bit unnerving.
What do you think? Is this a little odd to you or much to do about nothing at all. Have you had this happen to you? – René
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I’ve had this happen twice recently; once on a Delta operates flight from Cancun to LAX and again last week on a flight from LAX to JFK. I’ve also heard them announcing early departure times in the sky club recently
This happened to me once and I didn’t get any notification. As it happened, I was running late because I had parked at JFK and the AirTrain wasn’t working. Thankfully we departed out of Terminal 2 (which has a much shorter distance between the front doors and the gate than Terminal 4) and I still made the flight.
This happened Friday night at RDU. My flight from LGA was delayed about 20 minutes on a 35 minute connection. Flight from RDU was moved up 10 minutes. I got misconnected in RDU. I tweeted to Delta to let them know I would misconnect if they left early and they told me too bad, so sad. This was my Platinum qualifying flight. Not very happy about this.
I fly Delta domestically and this happens about once every other month. It has not impacted me but i do think:
1-This shows that on time is the SLA that airlines care about
2-Different standards exist for delays
3-lack of customer service focus
In the last 5 years I have had this happen 2 or 3 times.
If you arrived at the gate 15 min before the scheduled time, but the plane had pushed back, would you be entitled to denied boarding compensation if they didn’t let you on?