Delta cancellations: Parents scramble to help stranded children

• Following the CrowdStrike outage, Delta banned unaccompanied minors from flying.
• Two parents told Business Insider that meant their children were stuck.
• Delta said it made the call “to protect minors from separation from their families.”

Some parents say they’ve been left scrambling to help their stranded children after Delta Air Lines suddenly changed its policies as it grapples with lengthy delays and cancellations that have stretched into the fourth day.

“It was about three hours of complete panic,” one parent, Cecilia Stone, told Business Insider.

Delta remains the U.S. airline hardest hit by Friday’s global CrowdStrike outage.

Delta has cut more than 5,000 flights in the past five days, and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg announced on X that the agency has opened an investigation into the airline to ensure it is “taking care of its passengers.”

After the outage, Delta banned unaccompanied minors from traveling, a measure its competitors did not implement.

The airline initially suspended travel by unaccompanied minors through Sunday, The New York Times reported, but the company said on its website that children cannot fly alone until Tuesday.

Frustration and panic

Joel Fortney, a serial entrepreneur and loyal Delta customer, said his 12-year-old daughter was unable to fly home to Iowa after a two-week summer camp in Maine on Friday.

The girl remained calm as Fortney desperately tried to get his daughter home. “At the end of the day, I had a 12-year-old girl who was floating like wildfire,” he told BI.

Fortney’s daughter was able to spend the night in a hotel with some of her camp counselors, he said, and then he rebooked her on a United flight to Chicago the next day — where he and his wife drove six hours to pick her up.

Fortney was able to get a refund for the unused portion of the Delta ticket, but said he would “look into” other airlines in the future.

“I wouldn’t want this to happen to any other family,” he said. “I felt like it was a unique decision in Delta and it impacted people in a way that didn’t make sense.”

Stone, 39, said his son, a 17-year-old Navy cadet, was also stuck trying to fly from a Salt Lake City training camp to his home in San Diego on Saturday.

Donald had a regular ticket, but because he was a minor, he still wasn’t allowed to fly, Stone told BI. She said Delta didn’t notify her of the change; she found out when her son called her after he couldn’t check in for his flight.

Stone immediately began calling other airlines, she said, none of which had flights.

A few hours later, Stone was able to find a Southwest flight to San Diego that evening.

“It was just incredibly frustrating,” she said. “I was shocked that (Delta) thought this was acceptable.”

Delta told Business Insider in a statement that it was banning unaccompanied children from traveling “to protect minors from being separated from their families and caregivers in the event of flight disruptions or cancellations.”

“We take seriously the trust that caregivers place in us when they travel and sincerely apologize that this trust has been compromised by the confusion surrounding the embargo,” the airline said, adding that its teams were working to keep customers informed and to make things right for affected customers.

Stone said she has not yet received a refund. She plans to “stay away from Delta Airlines completely” in the future.