How one Delta airlines passenger turned multiple overbooked flights into $11,000

For many, the idea of having to cancel a family vacation because of three back-to-back overbooked flights sounds like a nightmare.

But for one New York City woman and her family, the dark cloud of travel frustration turned out to have a substantial silver lining.

“We walked away with $11,000 total,” Laura Begley Bloom said in an interview with CBS News.

According to Bloom, her family was preparing to fly from New York City to Florida for a family vacation Friday on a Delta Airlines flight.

“We were going to visit my husband’s parents in Aventura, its right next to Fort Lauderdale,” Bloom said.

Unfortunately (or not, as it turns out) for the family, the timing of the trip coincided with massive delays and backlogs for Delta due to a powerful storm.

The trouble started Wednesday as thunderstorms moved across Georgia and other states in the southeast, grounding many flights. About 60 per cent of Delta’s planes use the Atlanta airport on an average day, meaning the ripple effect of the storm was felt across their entire schedule.

Wednesday’s storm was “unprecedented” and hard to forecast, said the airline’s chief operating officer, Gil West. This led the airline to cancel some 3,000 flights, creating massive overbooking problems and backlogs.

Delta had trouble rebooking passengers because there weren’t many empty seats on later flights. In March, the average Delta flight was about 85 per cent full according to the Associated Press.

Enter Begley Bloom and her family.

READ MORE: What are your rights on an overbooked flight?

After hours of delays, Delta staff began looking for volunteers to give up their seats, offering $900 a ticket in gift cards. Bloom says her husband eventually haggled the price up to $1,350 a ticket – or a cool $4,050 for Bloom, her husband, and her daughter.

“The flight kept getting delayed and there was a lovely woman at the desk and we just kind of kept begging her,” Bloom said. “Finally she got a manager to sign off and they signed off on the gift cards.”

When they know a flight is oversold, airlines will ask for volunteers to give up their seat, usually for a travel voucher or other reward, and a seat on a later flight. According to the U.S. government, 434,000 passengers voluntarily gave up seats on the country’s largest 12 airlines last year.

The champion of overbooking was Delta Air Lines – about 130,000 passengers on Delta agreed to give up their seats last year.

So the Begley Bloom family went home, nearly $5,000 richer and with guaranteed tickets for Saturday.

Unfortunately, the situation was little changed when the family arrived Saturday morning.

“It was kind of a repeat on Saturday, we got to the airport, the flights were delayed and they were already asking for volunteers,” Bloom said.

And so the process repeated itself, with the price of “volunteer” payouts steadily climbing. At $1,300 a ticket, they once again agreed to give up their ticket.

“We said ‘hey if they give us more money, let’s do it again,’” Bloom said. “And pretty much the exact thing happened.”

However, it soon became clear that rebooking their flight for Sunday would be an issue as well. In a statement to its customers, Delta said its crews simply couldn’t accommodate the massive backlog in such a short amount of time.

“Unfortunately, availability of flight crews to operate within federally mandated crew rest and duty day guidelines following last week’s disruption are still prompting some additional cancellations and delays,” Delta said in its statement.

WATCH: Bill O’Reilly laughs about United Airlines passenger pulled off plane

With the prospects of even making their trip fading, Bloom inquired about cancelling their trip altogether – eventually netting $1,000 per ticket plus a full refund of their original ticket price.

And so their family went home sans vacation, but with a significant payout to compensate.

“There were so many people at the airport who were heading to weddings, people who were going to funerals, people who were going to see their dying parents, who had real reasons to go,” Bloom said.  “And of course, we had a reason to go – we wanted to see our family – but it wasn’t a life-or-death situation.”

This relatively pleasant experience of overbooking stands in stark contrast to the story of the man who was forcibly removed from a United Airlines flight in Chicago after his flight was overbooked.

Bloom, a professional travel writer, wrote about her experience in an article for Forbes.com. In concluding her post, she said a gate agent told her about “professional bumpers” who seek to get bumped from overbooked flights in order to collect compensation.

“This could be a new career,” Bloom joked.

-With files from Emanuela Campanella and the Associated Press