If you’ve been traveling by plane over the last several days or know someone who has, you’re undoubtedly aware that the worldwide aviation systems were thrown for a loop by the CrowdStrike outage. Depending on what airline you were flying with is determining whether you had only a minor inconvenience or if you’re dealing with multiple canceled flights and trying to find any way to get to your destination.
Most airlines have had issues because the IT problems affected at least one of the systems that keep airlines going. However, Delta Air Lines is having a larger problem than the other US carriers, with 41% of flights canceled on Sunday and another 45% of them leaving after being delayed. That’s 86% of Delta’s flights nationwide having some type of issue leaving on time.
If history tells us anything, it’s that a problem like this doesn’t correct overnight. It takes days for an airline to get planes and crew back into position to resume normal operations. If you have a flight on Delta or any airline this week, I’d suggest having a backup plan if you need to get to your destination. Except if you’re flying on Southwest, which was spared from the IT crash because they still use an ancient version of Windows.
It’s obviously not real (if nothing else, SW left Twitter-turned-X in early January). But it still made me chuckle.
Unfortunately, we have an upcoming flight with Delta, and I’d been trying to get a “Plan B” into place by booking last-minute backup flights on a different carrier in case our flight is canceled. Fortunately, I have plenty of practice doing this from the last several years when air travel was unusually chaotic. But more importantly, I have an ace in the hole because I booked my flight with Capital One Travel to use my Venture X travel credit.
Capital One Travel
Capital One has a travel portal where you can book airfare, hotels and rental cars. I’ve learned about this because you need to book travel with the portal in order to use the $300 travel credit from the Venture X card. However, booking through the portal has other advantages, which include earning bonus points, up to 10X for hotels and rental cars and 5X for flights.
In this case, I’d burnt all my Delta SkyMiles, so I needed to pay for our flights. It was a good time to spend my travel credit, so I booked through the portal. I didn’t think anything about it until I went to look at our flights to see what the policy was if our flights were canceled by Delta
That’s when I was reminded about a unique feature of booking flights with Capital One. They offer Flight Disruption assistance for a small fee.
Freebird
Understanding this coverage means you have to go back to the 2010s and an upstart company called Freebird.
They offered “insurance” for flights: they’d pay for a flight on any carrier if your original flight was significantly delayed or canceled. I paid $19 to cover our first flight with Frontier and was happy I didn’t have to find out how the service worked.
During the pandemic, Freebird didn’t make it out of the travel slump. However, Capital One saw an opportunity and acquired many of the company’s assets and employees in 2020.
That being said, it wasn’t until 2023 that Capital One introduced a similar service to Freebird to its customers when purchasing flights through their travel portal. Originally called “Rapid Rebooking”, the service is now called Flight Disruption Assistance.
Capital One Flight Disruption Assistance
You can add this coverage to flights purchased through the Capital One Travel Portal up until 24 hours before your flight. While not offered on every flight, you can pay for coverage, use Capital One points or use your Annual Travel Credit to purchase coverage, which works almost identically to Freebird. (Note from Sharon: So Freebird kinda sorta rose up from the ashes like a phoenix?)
For example, I paid $24 to cover my Delta flight. If my flight is canceled or delayed for over three hours, I can rebook on any flight between the same cities in the same class of service for the same day or the next day with Capital One Travel for flights up to $5,000. If I’d prefer, I can get a reimbursement of what I paid for the ticket and KEEP my original ticket.
While there are ways to stack these benefits from Capital One with what you get from the airline, I’m not worried about that. My major concern is getting to my destination. Now I have three different options depending on what happens on the day of travel.
I’m hoping my original flight leaves on time. If it’s canceled, I can either rebook using Capital One and cancel my backup award ticket on a different airline or I can take the money we paid for the ticket and fly on my backup reservation.
In situations like these, it pays to have more options than you need rather than not having any options and having to pay out of pocket for a last-minute ticket, like I had to do to get home from Las Vegas.
Want to comment on this post? Great! Read this first to help ensure it gets approved.
Want to sponsor a post, write something for Your Mileage May Vary, or put ads on our site? Click here for more info.
Like this post? Please share it! We have plenty more just like it and would love it if you decided to hang around and sign up to get emailed notifications of when we post.
Whether you’ve read our articles before or this is the first time you’re stopping by, we’re really glad you’re here and hope you come back to visit again!
This post first appeared on Your Mileage May Vary
