Delta passenger Janelle Rupkalvis was allegedly told to keep her cat quiet on a 5 a.m. flight from Seattle to Salt Lake City on February 19, or she’d be forced to deboard the plane.
“I’m not kidding. We sit down and within like 30 seconds, a minute, maybe two minutes, a flight attendant comes up to us,” Rupkalvis recalled in a TikTok video posted the day after her disastrous trip. “She goes, ‘If your cat doesn’t stop meowing, we’re going to have to ask you to get off the plane.”
Rupkalvis had been sitting with her four-year-old cat named Asparagus, otherwise known as Gus, and her partner in first class when the Delta Airlines employee approached them.
“I was like, ‘What?’ Like, ‘One, he’s a cat. Two, he’s not screaming.’ He’s meowing because there’s a lot of commotion. This is a scary thing for a little guy who’s sitting in a little carrier underneath the seat,” she said.
The first thought that crossed her mind was whether the attendant would have had the same reaction to a crying child.
“I was like, ‘There’s no way this is a rule. I’ve never heard this before,’” she said.
Rupkalvis and her partner attempted to quiet Gus while they contacted the airline via text to “clarify” their pet policy.
According to the representative Rupkalvis spoke to online, Delta’s policy states that that owner must be “responsible for keeping the pet passive and in the kennel for the duration of the flight.”
What’s more, the Delta agent said all pets “must be in a clean kennel that doesn’t create discomfort for other customers.”
Rupkalvis thought the word “passive” didn’t necessarily mean “silent.”
“That is a huge distinction,” she said before continuing to say she was “happy” to have received the policy details from her Delta text chat.
Before letting the online agent go, Rupkalvis asked if they could receive any compensation for “the incorrect information” they were given on the plane and the anxiety and stress it induced.
Fortunately for her, the Delta representative offered her and her partner each the choice between a $150 voucher or 15,000 miles.
“We took the miles. So, we got 30,000 miles out of the situation,” Rupkalvis said, before asking her followers: “What do you think about this travel mishap?”
One experienced flight attendant commented: “That makes me sad. I love all the animals.”
“I’m so sorry this not okay. That FA was in the wrong 100 percent,” a second viewer wrote on her TikTok video.
Meanwhile, another flight attendant said, “As a FA, I love my feline passengers! My cat meows a lot too when she’s going somewhere unfamiliar, I have wayyyy more issues with dog owners. Sorry you experienced that.”
Rupkalvis told the Post: “While the initial experience was frustrating, I really appreciated that level of customer service and the effort to acknowledge and address the situation."
In a statement sent to The Independent, a representative for Delta said: “We are aware of and are investigating the details of this event. Per Delta’s pet policy, pets must remain inside the kennel with the door secured while in a Delta boarding area, during boarding and deplaning, while in a Delta Sky Club® and while on board the aircraft.”
