Mom Details How Her Teen Ended Up Stranded in NYC for 5 Days Alone After Airline Cancellations: 'Beside Myself' (Exclusive)

Mar. 15, 2025

Jenn Stutler and her daughter (left), stock image of flight cancellations.Photo:Jenn Stutler; Getty

Jenn Stutler; Getty

Jenn thought that getting her daughter back from her first long stretch away from home would be as easy as dropping her off. As fate would have it, that was far from the case.

“The first thing that happens is our flight gets delayed to 9:00 a.m. I have a connecting flight in Atlanta, so I call my daughter. I wake her up and tell her, ‘Listen, I might miss my connecting flight. I have to figure it out, but I could be there later this afternoon,’ " Jenn tells PEOPLE of her conversation with her daughter. “An hour later, they cancel the flight, and it becomes very apparent that they’re canceling all the flights.”

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Delta planes grounded at LaGuardia Airport.Getty

Getty

“I reassured her I was going to try to navigate this with her. She was a little freaked out,” she says of her teen.

Noting that their family is from a “mid-sized town” in Florida, Jenn says it was a shock for her daughter to face navigating New York City alone.

“I called the school to talk to them around 10:00 a.m. The school said they could discharge her with my permission. I called the hotel, and they said there needed to be an adult with an ID to check her into thehotel room. So I start trying to figure out who do I know? And I don’t really know anyone up there who I would trust with my child,” she explains.

“Coincidentally, someone else I know said her husband’s flight also got canceled in New York. So I asked where he was staying and coincidentally, he was also staying at the same hotel because their daughter lives in the East Village. So I was like, ‘Perfect, can he check her in? I’ll add him to my reservation.’ And she said yes.”

Stock image of different cabs on a New York City street.Getty

Jenn guided her daughter, getting her an Uber and staying with her as she met up with the colleague’s husband, who was a stranger to her.

“I wasn’t trying to make him responsible for her in any way. I thought she was just going to stay the night in the hotel, get up in the morning, and fly home,” she notes.

However, the following morning, Jenn learned that this was just the beginning of a bigger issue. Delta sent out an alert saying that “unaccompanied minors” could not fly.

Jenn went to “look up what an unaccompanied minor is” and discovered, “That’s a designation, part of a program where you have to be between certain ages and sign up for it separately.”

“She isn’t part of that program and can fly alone. Nowhere does it say, ‘No one under the age of 18 cannot fly without a parent.’ It says ‘unaccompanied minor,’ which is language specific to that program with the airline,” Jenn says.

Stock image of child sitting on suitcase watching departure board.Getty

Jenn stayed on the phone with her daughter as she navigated another cab ride and her first time at an airport alone.

“She gets there and does everything she needs to. Her bag is checked when they tell her she cannot fly. The flight was going forward, but she could not fly because she is an unaccompanied minor,” the mom says.

This was frustrating for Jenn, who notes her teen wasn’t designated within that program. The airline assured her the stoppage forunderage travelerswas just for a day. They helped her rebook the teen on “the same flight from LaGuardia back home on Sunday.”

“She’s upset and crying, but I tell her it’s going to be okay. I called the hotel, and because it was so early, the room hadn’t been checked out. So I rebooked the room. I got her back to the hotel and told her to just stay there,” she says.

On top of trying to figure out the logistics, Jenn was worried her daughter was “scared.” She was determined to find answers.

“I call Delta. I wait on hold to talk to someone for hours. When I do get through, they’ve got nothing for me — no vouchers, no plan for the unaccompanied minors. As a mom, I’m thinking, ‘What about the other kids who didn’t have a hotel room and know someone up there who could check them into a hotel?’ "

Stock image of a tired woman leaning on her suitcase in n airport lounge.Getty

The next day, they tried again. Jenn checked to make sure that there were no updates regarding travel for unaccompanied minors.

“She gets there. She gets to the counter. They’re like, ‘The unaccompanied minor embargo has been extended through Tuesday,’ " she reveals, adding that, “At that point, s— really hit the fan.”

“The hotel had been checked out. I was absolutely beside myself. I said, ‘She doesn’t have anywhere to go, so now what happens?’ They said, ‘Well, she can stay in the SkyPriority Lounge. That’s where we have the kids.’ They had the kids spending the night at the SkyPriority Lounge in Delta, in LaGuardia, because they couldn’t get into hotel rooms because they were minors,” she explains.

“They had staff there overseeing them. I said, ‘I don’t feel comfortable with that.’ I’m hysterical, she’s crying.”

Jenn tried to get herself a flight to New York to accompany her daughter back. She booked a flight for Sunday, only for that flight to also get canceled. Frustrated, she looked for another solution so that her daughter wouldn’t be waiting indefinitely at the airport.

Stock image of aerial View of Buildings in Manhattan at Night.Getty

Jenn tried her colleague and found out he was supposed to be traveling back that day, but hadn’t left the hotel. He was able to add Jenn’s daughter to his reservation so that she could go back to the hotel and stay in the room.

It seemed like she’d safely made it through another day when the colleague’s husband’s flight home was also canceled. Now, he needed the hotel room back.

“He goes back to the hotel and thankfully, he booked her another room. She goes there and in the meantime, Delta rebooked her on a flight for Tuesday. In my gut, I knew they were going to extend this, so I started looking into getting a flight there,” she says.

Jenn had no luck getting a flight and had no choice but to wait until Tuesday morning. That’s when her “fears happened.”

“Her flight gets canceled because the embargo is still on. She cannot fly, but at least this time we knew it before we got to the airport. I called the colleague and said, ‘When is your flight?’ He said, ‘Well actually, my flight’s not until Wednesday.’ I called the airline and they were able to connect my daughter to his booking so it looks like she’s accompanied, but they didn’t have to sit together.”

Jenn Stutler and daughter, smiling during their reunion after 5 days apart.Jenn Stutler

Jenn Stutler

That plan managed to work, with the teen arriving home from New York on Wednesday, after being stuck for five days.

“It was a nightmare because every time I would try to get anyone on the phone at Delta, I was waiting hours. There was no communication. There was no priority given to minors over everyone else. There was no outreach communication to the parents for updates or a list to keep track,” she says.

“There was very poor communication from Delta and that made it hard to make good decisions. There were no vouchers given for anything. Afterward, I got an email from them that said, ‘We would like to extend 4,000 Sky miles as an apology.’ That’s like $150 worth of Sky miles. It was disgusting.”

Jenn wasn’t worried about the cost of trying to get her daughter home, but notes that it ended up being “over $3,500.”

“Of course, my number one priority was my child. But it did cost a bit and I didn’t really have a choice. She had to be at that hotel because that’s where the colleague’s husband was who could help. Between extending her room, the meals, the Ubers, it was very expensive and traumatic,” she says.

“She came home and felt crazy, like during the pandemic when you didn’t know what was going to happen from day to day. She was worried about seeing me. She also has a twin sister, and this was the first time they’ve ever been apart. It was a lot for her.”

For the mom, who still had the rest of her life to manage as usual, “It was super frustrating and stressful.”

“Obviously, I work and have to balance that and my other children and husband. The hardest part was not being able to make good decisions about what to do next because the limited information we were getting was always changing.”

“It’s a little frightening that a software glitch can take down an entire transportation system. It made me less confident in travel in general. My takeaway is that I’m so disappointed. I’ve been a loyal Delta customer for a while and I was just so disappointed in the communication and outreach,” Jenn says.

“I think they need to overhaul their program and plans for minor travel. They could have done a better job of communication, from what it means to be an unaccompanied minor to when the embargo was lifting. It should have been clearer and they should have reached out to the parents.”

She continues, “It was quite frightening that they were that exposed, that it’s now known they’re not equipped for an emergency. All I could think about were the parents whose kids were trapped inside the Sky Lounge. What are you feeding them? And they were sleeping on the floor.”

When asked for comment, Delta pointed PEOPLE totheir website, which states how customers can go about reimbursements and refunds for different travel mishaps as a result of the incident.

source: people.com