Trip Delays You Never Expected

There always seems to be an underlying angst with air travel, an uncertainty, all of us wary of the dreaded flight delay. Sometimes, our expectations are set well in advance, usually weather or mechanical. TripAssure is sharing 4 trip delays you wouldn’t expect, but did occur, and how travel protection is there to help.

 

The Benefits

Trip Delay occurs when a common carrier (usually an airline) delays your scheduled trip for 6 hours or more. After this time, travelers can be reimbursed for lodging, food, and local transportation.

Missed Connection can reimburse additional transportation cost to catch up to the trip and prepaid expenses for unused land or water arrangements after a common carrier delay of 3 or more hours.

With those in mind, please consider these unusual circumstances.

 

Freshly Brewed Emergency Landing

The pleasant scent of freshly brewed coffee is a common flight experience. Last December, it provoked a different response due to a malfunction. Travel and Leisure reported a coffee maker was the source of smoke filling the back of the plane. The flight from Orlando to Houston was forced to land in Pensacola to address the issue. The incident was not serious and no injuries were reported. For travel protection, mechanical breakdown of the plane, including a coffee maker, would be considered a common carrier delay.

 

Bird Without a Boarding Pass

Many have heard of a bird strike before, when a collision of a bird and the engine causes mechanical failure, but not many expect a bird to make it inside the cabin. This is exactly what happened on a Delta flight just before New Year’s. According to the Washington Post, a bird flew into the plane and reached the cockpit. Over an hour passed searching for the elusive bird, when the decision was made to take off. Shortly into the flight, the bird returned, and the pilots made the safe decision to return to Detroit. The search resumed and the flight wasn’t able to take off until later in the afternoon. TripAssure would consider a delay caused by an uninvited avian in the cockpit to be a common carrier delay.

 

Commode Complications

This is a true nightmare scenario. On the plane, mid-flight, hours to go, and the bathrooms break, eliminating all bathroom breaks. This happened not once, but twice, in late 2017. Travel and Leisure reported on the Delta Flight Diversion for a Bathroom Break, and again on the American Flight Emergency Landing so Passengers Can Use the Bathroom within weeks of each other. In each case, a malfunction caused all of the facilities to stop operating, and required a significant diversion to accommodate the call of nature for the passengers. TripAssure hopes nobody ever experiences this, but reminds you that commode complications in an airplane are indeed a common carrier caused delay.

 

One Delay Not Enough?

A trip delay or missed connection can be a frustrating experience for anyone.  But have you considered the frustration if it happens twice on the same flight? This month, a single flight from Atlanta to London was forced to turn back twice, according to ABC News. The 7pm flight diverted when the pilots heard a mysterious noise. Just after midnight, the flight departed again, only to return to Atlanta again at 1:30am, after the noises returned. These are most certainly a common carrier delays, though Delta was reported to provide hotel accommodations for the passengers.

 

Bonus: The Time Travel Flight

Not a trip delay scenario, more of a fun anecdote to share. A recent Hawaiian Airlines flight broke the laws of time and space, sort of. The Huffington Post wrote about Flight 446 that departed Honolulu on Jan. 1, 2018 at 12:05am and arrived at Auckland on Dec. 31, 2017 at 10:16am. Ok, so this isn’t really time travel, rather an anomaly caused by the International Date Line in the Pacific Ocean.

 

TripAssure hopes you never have to tell a story like these from personal experience, but our travel protection plans are here to help if you do. This information is meant to be a summary of benefits, for full details, please refer to the plan documents. Please contact TripAssure with any questions; our agents are eager to assist you.