Delta Air Lines reportedly offered passengers $10,000 to leave a recent overbooked flight from Michigan to Minnesota, multiple news outlets reported.
Jason Aten, a tech columnist at Inc. magazine, was on the flight along with his family waiting to take off when a flight attendant broadcast over the intercom for volunteers, he wrote earlier this week.
Aten wrote that the airline was looking for eight volunteers to give up their seats on what he said was an oversold flight, and offered $10,000 cash each.
“If you have Apple Pay, you’ll even have the money right now,” the flight attendant said, he added.
His story was corroborated by another person on Twitter who said he was on the same flight.
A spokesperson for Delta told The Hill that it did not confirm or deny that the incident took place.
However, the spokesperson added that there is compensation available to ground staff when such incidents take place.
“That compensation provides our employees with the ability to ensure that our overbooked flights are able to take care of customers and then ultimately dispatch or get our aircraft out on time,” they added.
The airline had previously increased the maximum compensation limit it would pay to entice passengers to get off oversold flights from $1,350 to nearly $10,000, according to CNBC.
At the time of the reported increase in compensation limits, Money.com reported that it came in the wake of a viral social media video that showed a passenger being dragged off an oversold United Airlines flight.
The incident also comes at the time of a surge in demand for airline travel after pandemic lockdowns and amid pilot and staffing shortages.
Delta CEO Ed Bastian took to his LinkedIn page to apologize for flight delays and cancellations this 4th of July weekend.
“If you’ve encountered delays and cancellations recently, I apologize,” Bastian said in a letter shared on his LinkedIn page. “We’ve spent years establishing Delta Air Lines as the industry leader in reliability, and though the majority of our flights continue to operate on time, this level of disruption and uncertainty is unacceptable.”
Air ticket prices are on the rise, as are delays and cancellations, meaning travelers can’t be sure they’ll get to their destination on time — if at all.