The employee in question dipped into her own pocket to pay for Miriam Thomas to get home after Delta canceled her ticket just as she was about to get on a plane to return home after a business trip, local news station News1130 reported:

“I went back through security, back to the customer service desk and that’s when it started to get crazy. The Alaska Airlines people were trying to figure out why Delta had cancelled my flight, Delta was trying to figure out what had happened. I was just standing at the desk with my bags seriously hoping I can get on some flight that day.”

She says after an hour of standing at the desk, she found out what happened. “When they had the mechanical maintenance and we ended up in Seattle and had to spend the night in a hotel there, they used the rest of the value of my entire ticket on that rescheduled flight that morning so there was no more money for me to fly home. They didn’t tell me that.”

Eventually, an Alaska Airlines employee named Judy paid for Thomas’ new flight, saying she was “paying it forward.” Judy may have also earned her company a new customer for life — Thomas said she was now “an Alaska Airlines convert.”