Delta Issues A Change Fee Waiver For Flights To/From Europe

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Following the news that the United States is banning select travelers from entering the country if they have been traveling in any one of the 26 European countries signed up to the Schengen Agreement in the past 14 days, Delta is waiving change fees for bookings to/from certain European counties…including some countries not included in the ban.

Delta’s Transatlantic Change Fee Waiver

Countries Covered

Passengers travel to/from/through the following countries are covered by Delta’s latest change fee waiver:

  • Belgium
  • Czech Republic
  • Denmark
  • France
  • Germany
  • Greece
  • Ireland
  • Italy
  • Netherlands
  • Portugal
  • Spain
  • Switzerland
  • United Kingdom

Ireland and the United Kingdom are not covered by the ban that comes into effect tomorrow (more details on the ban here) but Delta appears to be happy to waive change fees for travel to/from/through those two countries anyway.

Passengers Covered

Delta says that customers who have travel booked to/from/through the countries listed above and whose tickets were issued on/before 9 March 2020 are covered by the new change fee waiver.

Note: Delta already has a change fee waiver in place which covers all routes and all bookings made between 1 March and 31 March 2020 so anyone who booked European travel on 10 or 11 March will still be covered even though this new waiver appears to exclude them.

Travel Dates Covered

The change fee waiver covers travel through 31 May 2020 (which is considerably past the 30 days that the European travel ban will supposedly last for).

Rebooking Limitations & Arrangements

  • New tickets must be re-issued on/before 31 December 2020
  • Rebooked travel must commence no later than 31 December 2020
  • Rebooked travel must be complete no later than one year from the original ticket issue date.

Delta is offering customers 3 options:

  1. Remain on current flights
  2. Change to different flights
  3. Cancel trip

Option 1 is really only open to customers who are traveling home (in Europe), to passengers not covered by the travel ban or to passengers traveling after the ban is lifted and before 31 May.

Customers taking Option 2 will be allowed to make a “one-time change” and Delta will waive the traditional change fee. Any fare differences that arise due to the flight change will have to be paid by the customer.

Option 3 allows customers to cancel their trip and apply any unused value towards future travel (which must take place within a year of the original ticket issue date).

Bottom Line

This new change fee waiver looks to be more or less in line with the other change fee waivers we’ve seen Delta (and others) offering but it’s interesting to see that the airline has included the UK and Ireland in this waiver when it didn’t really have to.

Also, it’s worth noting that if you booked travel to/from Europe on/after 1 March 2020 you should be covered by the more generous waiver policy that Delta introduced last week (link).

3 COMMENTS

  1. You say “Any fare differences that arise due to the flight change will have to be paid by the customer.”

    But Delta says “Note, if changes are made to the originally ticketed cities or rescheduled travel occurs beyond the guidelines, the change fee will be waived, however, a difference in fare may apply.”

    Doesn’t that mean if you keep the same city pairs you can switch to any date you wish in 2020 for free?

Comments are closed.