Clo,
While I agree this is a nightmare for Delta, there's more to the story than what you see in the video.
The contract that Delta has with the Pentagon allows soldiers to have up to 3 checked bags with no extra fees and in fact the Pentagon's travel regulations states that soldiers traveling on non-military flights are limited to only 3 checked bags unless their orders state otherwise. In this case the troops involved DID have orders which stated that they were allowed to check one additional bag, for a total of 4 each. However, what these men were NOT aware of, probably because they were reservists and had never been in this situation before, was that the Pentagon did NOT expect Delta to check the extra bags for free, but rather the soldiers were supposed to, upon arriving at their final destination, request reimbursement (along with a copy of their orders stating how many bags they were authorized to check) for any excess baggage fees that they were charged as long as they had not exceeded the limit specified in their orders.
There never was any official expectation that Delta was going to check the extra bag(s) gratis and since their contract with the Pentagon had no provision for situations were soldiers were actually authorized to have more than 3 bags, which was all that they were being paid for, everything was working exactly as it was supposed to, except for the fact that the men traveling should have been warned up front what was going to happen and what it was that they needed to do to get their money back. Granted, you could argue that the contract with Delta should have covered situations like this, but that would have meant that Delta would have had to ascertain for each person checking in as to whether he/she had written orders allowing more than 3 bags or not and then making exceptions based on these orders on a case-by-case basis. I suspect that when the contract with Delta was written that the financial people figured that if the vast majority of the troops were only checking 3 bags or less, that it in the end it would better to just pay those people who were authorized the extra checked bags directly and not mess with the complexity that this would have added to the contract, to say nothing to the process of making sure that the extra money that Delta would be asking for was really legitimate or not.
And while I agree that this will be a PR nightmare for Delta, it wasn't really their fault nor even the Pentagons, but perhaps we should blame the media and people like Matt Drudge for blowing this thing completely out of proportion and making it look like something which it was not; Delta gouging a group of American heroes returning home from a war zone.
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