Christina says she paid $200 for Delta to keep an eye on her son on a round trip flight, but inexplicably allowed him to walk off the flight with a man the flight attendants thought was his uncle. She spotted her son with the man, but worries about what might have happened had she not been there at the right time.

She writes:

I am at the end of my rope here, and my boyfriend told me to contact your company. I have attached the email feed between me and the Delta/NWA coordinator for all of the insane details of my sons unaccompanied trip with their airline. My son walked off of the plane with a stranger! Some man that the attendants thought was his Uncle! If I was not there at the right time, the man could have left the airport with my son and no one would have known!

I waited in the security line at LAX for 2 1/2 hours to get in to his gate because of the heightened security. I didn’t even mind because I knew how “secure” the airlines had to be. This was also a few days after the “NWA/Delta Detroit bomb on the plane scare.” Which was the same city my son was leaving from on the same airline. I was also very close to missing him get off of the plane because I was told 4 different times that the gate number was switched.

My son has been flying as an unaccompanied minor since he was 5, he’s 8 now. The fees for this is $200 round trip which I have happily paid for the security and watchful eye of my son. They put him somewhere in the middle of the plane next to a stanger (man) who, as my son put it, “helped” him the whole time. Can sex offenders fly without anyone knowing? WHERE WERE THE ATTENDANTS?! As the front desk lady put it, they were “panicked that they couldn’t find him on the plane”. After he was already out with me for 10 minutes, they knew he was missing, and they didn’t call security?! Like I said, it was very easy for that man to have left with him.

The lady that I had spoken to at first replied with a generic email asking me the details I had already provided her. Then she tells me that there is going to be some lame refund of the unaccompanied minor fee. ($200 refund for the possibility that your son could have been kidnapped) I called the number that she provided me numerous times, and there was not record associated with the document number she provided me. Again I emailed her, again she “apologized for the delay”. I played the phone run around game yesterday for quite a while. At one point I was transferred to a non working number! After I was finaly able to speak to someone in the refund department, I was told that my coordinator did NOT send a report. There was no record of it!

Please, if you could post this to make caring mothers and fathers aware of this, I would be so grateful. I realize at this point that I probably will never see a refund, and those flight attendants will never get reprimanded but I need this story to get out.

After Christina complained to Delta and said she’d be share her story with us, the airline offered her half the $200 as a refund, along with an additional $200 ticket credit in her son’s name. She says there’s no way she’ll let her son fly on the airline again.

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