Since we celebrated the 2nd birthday of Delta’s Blog this week, it seems only appropriate to highlight how far we’ve come in 80 years of communications with our customers.

When we started carrying passengers in 1929, we engaged potential customers by phone calls, in-person presentations to businesses and local clubs, and print media: letters, small black & white newspaper ads, a couple of brochures and flyers.  This was our first color ad from 1930:

Hotels were also important venues for us. As Delta employee Wallace Harmon, remembers prior to World War II, “We had no marketing department. In large cities we had a city traffic manager. . . who would go to the hotels and check the brochure racks to be sure that our timetables were here, and that was pretty well the extent of the marketing effort. Except that they would also make calls on the hotel porter because the porter was the guy that the hotel guests would call to get reservations on airlines. Now this is a hold-over from the railroads. A few of the things that we did to begin with were hold over from the railroad.”

Marie Force
Archives Manager