A Delta Air Lines passenger was shocked when he printed his boarding pass and saw the confirmation code. The code on his pass for his Pensacola, Fla., to Albany, N.Y flight said "H8GAYS" right next to his name.
"At first I didn't think I read it right," White, a student at the University of West Florida., told the Washington Post. "I was worried that another customer might think I somehow picked that code. If I were a gay male, I might have thought that a Delta worker purposely gave me that code, and that would have made me extremely uncomfortable."
In response to the incident, Delta didn't do much more than offer an apology. The airline said sorry for any "concern or misunderstanding" that its code may have caused White. "These confirmation codes are computer-generated and are completely random," Russell Cason, a Delta spokesman told the Post. "We will make every effort to ensure that a similar combination does not occur in the future."
White said he's surprised that the airline hadn't blocked the offensive combination of letters in the first place in order to avoid such an incident. He hopes that the airline never lets the incident happen again.
"I'm an IT major, and what surprises me is that they didn't block [his confirmation code] as a possibility of the string of random numbers and letters in the software they use to generate the code", White said "I'm sure they removed many four-letter words that would be seen as offensive. I'm surprised that 'gays' and 'H8' weren't blocked as well."
This wasn't the only incident of its kind. The airline Jetstar took some heat after a customer received his checked bag with the words "I Am Gay" written in bold letters on the luggage tags.
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