Delta Wants You to Know in Advance When the Weather Will Impact Your Flight – Here’s How They’re Doing It

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Delta is already one of my favorite airlines.  I’ve been accumulating miles on my Gold Delta SkyMiles® Credit Card from American Express for several years now and it seems like there are so many ways to pick up extra rewards miles, like promotions with their partners such as Lyft.

They are almost always on schedule, the planes are comfortable, the boarding process is simple, they don’t make you pay to bring a wallet-sized bag on the plane, and they have great award sales.  Plus, they are reportedly going to start offering free Wi-Fi on Delta flights in the near future!

Now they are stepping up their game and improving the passenger experience a little more.  Delta is going the extra mile (I can never resist a good pun) and plans to start alerting their passengers directly whenever weather changes increase the chance of a flight delay.

In the past, we’ve listed a few suggestions on what to do when your flight is delayed intending to help folks make the best of a rough situation.  I’ll say – I do like the idea of Delta monitoring this for me though.

It seems like everyone has at least one story about how a flight delay could have (or did) completely wreck their vacation.  Some people are able to find ways to make the most of a delay (thanks to lucrative card perks), others are stuck sleeping on the floor of the airport waiting for better news.  A delayed flight is annoying for the passengers, but it actually costs the airlines a lot of money too.  So it makes sense that Delta is working help keep operations running as smoothly as possible even through rough weather conditions.

What This Means – A Look Behind the Scenes of Delta

Delta is devoted to improving their weather technology, and what exactly does this mean?  They are already testing a new forecasting tool that will pull data from 4 different weather systems so it’s aggregated into one centralized source.  The benefit here is all of this information is being analyzed in order to provide a more accurate prediction of the weather.

When this launches in early 2019 (hopefully), passengers will be able to view a 5-day forecast based on the airports they are traveling to and from.  They’ll also have the option to sign-up for alerts and notifications for major weather changes that might impact flight times.

Here’s the Big Question

What’s so great about this new development?  Have you ever spent the night before a flight anxiously updating various weather maps in order to predict if your flight is going to be delayed or canceled?  I sure have and usually, I guess wrong.  So I’d rather have a team of Delta meteorologists sending me updates on inclement weather and flight delays than constantly trying to guess this on my own.  Wouldn’t you? 🙂

Then again, frequent text messages about the weather might be a bit overwhelming.  What do you think?  Would you find weather updates from Delta annoying?  Or would you be able to relax knowing that someone was keeping a close eye on weather changes that could cause a delayed or canceled flight?  Let me know your thoughts in the comment section below!

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Hat tip:  The Points Guy