A potential alliance with Saudi Arabian Airlines is causing a lot of headaches for Delta, which finds itself at the center of a tawdry PR battle over visas, religion, and partnerships. Joe Brancatelli shares secrets and proven tips for first- and business-class road warriors. Two of the nation’s big airlines are playing aviation poker with the federal government. Delta and US Airways want to swap their slots in New York and Washington to improve their own bottom lines. But will passengers be left with a bum deal? This publishing executive dons a headscarf to get classic children’s books into Middle Eastern schools. 
Word to the savvy businessperson when confronted by unseemly accusations about your corporate practices: Even if it’s true, say you are only following orders.
Word to the savvy businessperson trying to figure out why no one is listening to your side of the story: Try not obliviously repeating a failed mantra over and over.
These useful bits of business insight are brought to you by the letter D. D as in Delta Air Lines and its disastrous, duplicitous, and just plain dumb response to a disgusting controversy swirling around its potential alliance with Saudi Arabian Airlines and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’s exclusionary visa practices.
When and where, exactly, this tawdry tale begins is a judgment call. If you’re so inclined, you can trace it all the way back to our tangled alliance with Saudi Arabia and the House of Saud, the kingdom’s ruling family. Because we need their oil and consider them a stable and moderating force in the Middle East, we put up with things from the Saudis that many Americans find morally repugnant.
If you wish to visit Saudi Arabia, for example, you must disclose your religion on the visa application. The U.S. State Department’s information sheet on travel to Saudi Arabia goes so far as admit that there are “reports” of discrimination against Jewish travelers and anyone who has merely visited Israel. Women are also advised to travel with care due to the Saudi government’s ultra-strict interpretation of Islamic law (sharia). And as recently as 2004, the Saudi government explicitly published a ban against visits from “Jewish people” on one of its official websites. It took pressure generated by Anthony Weiner, the now-disgraced former Congressman, before the Saudis expunged the wording.
For the sake of clarity and brevity, however, let’s fast-forward to January of this year when Saudi Arabian Airlines announced plans to join the SkyTeam Alliance, a code-share and marketing network fronted primarily by Delta and Air France. The Saudi flag carrier would be only the second Arab carrier to join a global airline alliance. The other is Royal Jordanian, a member of Oneworld.
Business travelers and business journalists didn’t pay much attention to the SkyTeam announcement because Saudi Arabian’s “official” integration into the alliance was at least a year away. Besides, the airline doesn’t have the extensive international route network of more aggressive Arab carriers such as Emirates of Dubai or Qatar Airways. Right-wing bloggers and talk-show hosts were hardly as blasé, however.
Always on the lookout for what they insist is “creeping sharia” and “insidious” Muslim influence on American society, they picked up on a narrow part of what Saudi Arabian Airlines’ entry into SkyTeam might mean: Delta would certainly sell passage on Saudi Arabian flights and might forge a code-share agreement to put its DL computer code on Saudi Arabian’s flights from New York and Washington. And since that would mean Delta would have to check the visas of any passenger boarding a flight bound for Saudi Arabia, Delta was discriminating against Jews because the Saudi government had a track record of not issuing visas to Jews.
Enter WND.com, a fringe site that mostly traffics in Obama birther conspiracies and advertisements for post-apocalyptic survival strategies. On June 22, it published a screed about Delta, Saudi Arabian Airlines, and the visa issue. But the rant also reproduced two letters from a Delta apparatchik whose defense was as cringe-inducing as it was clueless: Delta would only be following orders by checking visas.
That’s all it took to ignite a firestorm. With varying degrees of accuracy, most subsequent stories—which appeared all weekend and earlier this week in outlets as diverse as , the Huffington Post, and major TV-news operations—essentially claimed that Delta was discriminating against Jews. Despite some ham-fisted attempts to explain itself more fully, Delta inevitably fell back on the only-following-orders response. Delta seemed powerless to correct any of the blatant falsehoods that were being reported. And it didn’t understand the stunningly inappropriate nature of suggesting that Delta was simply checking travel documents and was legally bound to ignore the greater meaning of the paperwork or the machinations behind the Saudi visa process.
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