UPDATE: Tickets secured!

After a looooong struggle and dance with Delta’s systems, which included having Hanna’s account flagged for possible fraud because of all the miles gifts that were coming in, we’ve had a breakthrough. A member of this community reached out to someone Most Senior in Delta, and within a few minutes all the needed flights were secured.

What a gift. Sheesh.

Systems can’t care. People can. I spent uncounted hours at my desk and nearly four hours on the phone with people whose ability to care is limited by policies and processes. The architects of those policies and processes necessarily work in broad strokes that cover most typical cases. The need to defend against fraud is understandable, but those defenses prevented the people I spoke with from acting on their desire to care.

Things didn’t loosen up until we spoke with someone who had the power to act outside the system, outside the broad-stroke processes. Once we found that someone, she waved a wand and Poof! Confirmed flights.

(Huge thanks to Amanda, who had the idea and follow-through to make this happen. Huge thanks to Susanna at Delta, who has a magic wand and who wields it with love.)

 

Original post follows below.


14 August 2023



Hello,

This is a short-term request for a very specific kind of support. Here’s the situation in nice businesslike bullet points, just like the ones they use in presidential briefings….

• Hanna is in South Africa with family, friends, and all the creatures and memories of her home.

• She is experiencing sporadic and quite difficult back pains. These started two decades ago, continued off and on, worsened during the pandemic. As ALS weakens her core, the back issues are becoming more persistent.

• A dear friend worked conversational magic to score Hanna a lie-flat bed in the first-class cabin to South Africa. That’s the ONLY way to make a seventeen-hour flight possible for her.

• Now we are working on making the same arrangement for Hanna’s return flight, without spending the $8,000+ required for a first-class seat. We’ve had the brainstorm of using air miles. The price in miles? 495,000.

Well, we thought we’d try.

If you have accumulated air miles on Delta or one of its partner airlines, and would be willing to donate some of them toward this possibility for Hanna, please contact Marc Rettig before the morning of Thursday, August 17.

Thank you, fellow sailors on these seas.

Marc

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