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During these weeks many flights had been cancelled because of the COVID-19.

Why do some airlines and air travel agencies send confirmation emails even if the flight has been cancelled?

Examples:

  • LATAM: Flights from Peru were cancelled because of the state of emergency. However, one day before the flight, my flight was still appearing as SCHEDULED.

    I called LATAM to ask if the flight is indeed scheduled and not cancelled. They told me that so far they do not have that specific flight marked as cancelled in their systems and they recommended to check the next day (the day of the flight). They mentioned a refund can't be done because the flight is not cancelled.

    Obviously, during the night, SCHEDULED turned into CANCELLED.

  • Delta Airlines: Flight cancelled, but they send emails how to prepare for the flight and how to reach the airport and buy seats.

  • Kiwi.com and Opodo.com.uk: Flight cancelled, but they send notifications via email and push notifications to prepare for the flight and prepare my bags etc.

Apart from technical issues, is there any strategy in this scenario (e.g. marketing, whatever)?

I am a programmer and I can imagine that in the source code they can simply have an if condition checking if the flight was cancelled to not send any notifications anymore related to how to prepare for the flight.

phoog
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1 Answers1

10

'I'm a programmer...'

International airline ticketing systems are huge, complex systems requiring interaction with the public, the staff, and other huge complex ticketing systems. Ensuring an accurate and timely flow of information through such a structure is no mean feat.

These systems were built for an environment where most flights departed on or fairly close to schedued time. In a matter of weeks the world has gone from that to an environment where most flights are now cancelled.

Your 'simple "if"' may not be simple at all, but assuming the change was to be made, the process of approval, development, testing, staging and deployment could easily take weeks. There simply hasn't been time for such development to take place, even assuming that the developers consider that it's worthwhile.

I suggest that with the chaos currently reigning in the air travel industry, receiving an email with directions to the airport has been considered unimportant.

Airlines have bigger fish to fry.