Delta's Outage Resulted in Roughly $100 Million in Lost Revenue
If you're a frequent traveler, chances are you're well aware that there have been quite a few computer issues lately. Most recently, British Airways had issues at an unknown number of airports today, but earlier this summer both Southwest and Delta had outages that resulted in a significant number of delays and cancellations in all cases. And now we know the full impact of the outage for one of those carriers — about $100 million in lost revenue for Delta Air Lines.
The $100 million in lost revenue includes both cancellations (there were about 2,300 during the course of the four-day outage and aftermath) and recovery efforts. For example, Delta had to dish out more overtime for employees' pay. The Atlanta-based carrier also offered $200 travel vouchers to passengers whose flights were delayed more than three hours or canceled, but the airline didn't confirm exactly how many it gave out.
The outage, which was caused by a hardware breakdown after a power failure, cost the carrier more than just revenue, but it also made its statistics suffer. On-time performance dropped to 79.9% from 85.5% a year earlier, and cancellations jumped from 0.2% last August to 2% this year after the outage. In the few weeks since the outage, the one thing for certain is that no one — Delta nor its passengers — came out ahead.