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Southwest Airlines schedule stabilizes after holiday meltdown but costs are still piling up
Southwest Airlines stabilized its schedule over the weekend after about 16,000 cancellations, but its systemwide holiday meltdown could cost it hundreds of millions of dollars. Southwest canceled 304 flights since Friday, 2% of its schedule, most of them on Monday when U.S. airlines faced bad weather and ground stops in Florida tied to a Federal Aviation Administration equipment outage. (www.cnbc.com) More...
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SWA has had a great record for 50 years. I’ve always enjoyed flying on them. They need to catch up on technology. The paper napkin ATIS and manual computation of weight and balance in the jetway were cute and clever when they were small but they are in the big leagues now.
Interesting, I can't stand them. First of all when traveling with family their boarding system stresses my wife out as she doesn't know what seat she will get (she prefers window seats) and is afraid that we won't get seats together. But the big issue is their customer service when things go south as we've found out this year. In our case a weather cancellation left us stranded at MKE. They had inadequate staff with only a couple of gate agents and no ticket agents at the main counter, just folks that took in baggage. As a result they needed to pull ramp workers into the terminal to handle the crush of upset passengers and they were rude at best. Eventually after 2 1/2 hours of complaining I finally got to talk to a real gate agent who "found" seats for us on the next day's flight. We lost a full day at our destination and had to pay $$$ for the last hotel room (there was a huge concert in town) and an extremely overpriced rental car (also one of the last ones left). Milwaukee was nice enough so that was good but it was such a stressful experience I've sworn them off and we will stick with Alaska and Delta from now on as they have much, much better customer service.
You can pay a small amount extra to get boarding in A group. I have been flying SWest for 20+ years and have had only one problem. The problem was weather-related and there was nothing that they could do about that. People were screaming at the desk agent . . . she thanked me for my behavior. People can be very rude. I love that they allow 2 free bags.
I can't blame ANY paying passenger for not being upset at the situation they were in. SWA knew they had a outdated (1991 vintage) crew routing software and just didn't address it...... until the weather proved to them you better wake up and pay attention.
It kind of makes you wonder what the hell they did with the $7B during the Covid fiasco?
Just another case of a business being reactive, instead of proactive! “If it I ain’t broke, why fix it”?
