Southwest Airlines’ Most Flight Cancelled by Wednesday, Dec. 3: The Number of Flights on the Lattice Has Revisited
Air travelers in the US hoping for clear skies on Tuesday following a disastrous week of weather-related flight cancellations and delays will have to extend their patience a few more days — particularly if they’re flying with Southwest Airlines.
Southwest had the most flights Cancelled by Wednesday, according to FlightAware. On Tuesday, 2,694 flights were canceled by the company and they have 2,548 canceled for Thursday.
Southwest announced on Thursday it would resume normal operations this weekend, after canceling roughly 13,000 flights in the last week. In the last few months, some of those who tried to find flights on different airlines experienced sky-high prices for the same route.
Information technology and internal processes are among the older ones. Southwest’s schedule hasn’t changed a lot since the 1990s, according to the president of the Southwest Airlines Pilots Association.
“We had a tough day today. “Tomorrow will likely be another rough day as we work our way out of this,” Jordan said in an interview.
The Southwest Holiday Season: When You Can’t Reach Us, or If You’ve Been In The Lurch, Then You Can Call (NEWTON)
Several people in Atlanta spoke with CNN’s Nick Valencia about their experiences traveling with Southwest this holiday season.
Calls made Monday afternoon by CNN to Southwest’s customer service did not go through, so customers couldn’t even get in the queue to speak to a representative. Southwest told CNN that it’s staffed to answer calls.
The founder of Scott’s Cheap flights suggests trying an international number if you’ve been left in the lurch and are unable to reach a customer service agent.
“The main hotline for US airlines will be clogged with other passengers getting rebooked. To get through to an agent quickly, call any one of the airline’s dozens of international offices,” Scott Keyes said.
Jay Mc Vay said at a press conference on Monday night in Houston that the storms impacted many of the larger stations and that he had canceled over 100 flights.
“With those cancellations and as a result, we end up with flight crews and airplanes that are out of place and not in the cities that they need to be in to continue to run our operations.”
McVay said the company’s first priority is safety. He stated, “We want to make sure we have the flight crews that have enough time to operate these flights, and we want to make sure they operate these flights safely.”
“We will do everything that we need to do to right the challenges that we’ve had right now,” he said, including “hotels, ride assistance, vans … rental cars to try and make sure these folks get home as quickly as possible.”
If you’ve left, McVay told you to “do what you need to do for your family, keep your receipts.” The fact that they are taken care of is not a question.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/southwest-flight-cancellations-winter-storm-tuesday/index.html
A Southwest Airlines Advisory Message on Monday’s Flight Cancellation in Buffalo, Cleveland, Syracuse, and the U.S. Airport
An announcement made in the terminal prior to the news conference apologized to customers, and said the next available SWA seats are on Saturday, December 31st and later. The agent said Southwest would be providing buses to area hotels and assured that “we will have sufficient rooms for all customers who are affected by this disruption.”
The United State Department of Transportation said in a statement that it is concerned about Monday’s flight cancellation by Southwest Airlines.
Mike Santoro, a vice president of the Southwest Airlines Pilots Association, said they have been harping on them for the past few years.
“We’ve been having these issues for the past 20 months,” he said. We’ve seen a lot of these sort of meltdowns occur, they just have to do with outdated processes and outdated IT.
He said the processes haven’t changed in the last two decades. “It’s phones, computers and programs that connect us to airplanes, that’s the problem, and it’s systemic throughout the airline.”
Buffalo International Airport said on Wednesday that passenger flights would not resume before 11 a.m. and that the expected reopening would be 24 hours later than before.
Greyhound, the nation’s largest provider of bus services, issued a service alert on Monday afternoon stating it will be canceling many of its scheduled services until further notice due to the winter weather. Affected cities include Buffalo, Cleveland and Syracuse.
A winter storm that swept across the US was ill-timed for travelers who had started pushing Christmas week flying numbers back toward pre-pandemic levels.
A Video Statement on Southwest Airlines’ Unprecedented Travel Disruption and the Impact on a Hot and Cold Airline Network
The cap applies in many US and Latin American markets where Southwest also flies. The dollar amount for the cap was not specified by Josh Freed.
The cost of a flight to San Francisco from Los Angeles was more than four times higher than it was three days ago.
“We continue to get people to their destinations as safely and quickly as possible this busy holiday season and our latest effort includes capping fares in select cities to make sure our flights are available to as many customers as possible,” Freed told CNN.
Making the travel nightmare worse, Southwest has a policy of not rebooking customers on rival airlines. Southwest Airlines does not have interline agreements with other carriers that would allow its agents to rebook passengers on a different airline, narrowing the options for stranded passengers.
In a video statement on Tuesday, Southwest CEO Bob Jordan spoke to frustrated customers, saying, “I’m truly sorry.” Jordan said the mass cancellation was due to record cold temperatures across the country. “[A]fter days of trying to operate as much of our full schedule across the busy holiday weekend, we reached a decision point to significantly reduce our flying to catch up.”
This week has seen a magnification of the situation, which has been causing frustration and anger among passengers, as major airlines recover from the extreme cold, ice and snow that affected much of the United States over the holiday weekend.
“We are encouraged by the progress we’ve made to realign crew, their schedules and our fleet,” it said. We know our apologies to customers, employees and everyone affected by this disruption will only go so far.
Southwest acknowledged the company’s outdated infrastructure. “We’ve talked an awful lot about modernizing the operation, and the need to do that,” CEO Bob Jordan told employees in a memo obtained by CNN.
Can Southwest Deliver? When Covid-19 Happened in the First Month of the 2020 U.S. Airline Wallfall Revisited
Cancellation rates among airlines fluctuate year-to-year, depending on weather and other factors, such as Covid-19, which resulted in a major industry-wide disruption in the early months of the pandemic in 2020.
The data was released over the course of the year. CNN analyzed the carrier’s data from previous years to ensure a fair comparison.
The big question on everyone’s mind: Can Southwest now deliver? As air traffic picks up Friday morning, the picture will become clearer.
It would be a relief for the passengers if those planes were back up and there were no more piled up luggage. It has a mark on its back.
Top US government officials are disconcerted, to say the very least, about how Southwest got to this point in the aftermath of a massive winter storm that every other major US airline had under control days ago.
“We’ve set up a page at Southwest.com/traveldisruption for customers to submit refund and reimbursement requests for meals, hotel and alternate transportation; as well as to connect customers to their baggage.”
That doesn’t change how the airline’s systems are able to let things go wrong and how they need to not happen again. And the Department of Transportation (DOT) is still taking a firm line with Southwest.
In an interview with Nexstar Media, U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said he was working with other airlines to ensure they’re offering affordable fares, but acknowledged that his power to enforce such fares was limited.
“It would be an unfair and deceptive practice not to fulfill this commitment to passengers,” Buttigieg wrote, specifically referring to alternative travel reimbursements.
“The airline said to me that they were going to go above and beyond what’s required of them,” Buttigieg said Thursday in an interview with NBC News. “I’m looking to make sure they actually do that, and if they don’t, we are in a position to levy tens of thousands of dollars per violation per passenger in fines.”
Reply to the Comment by Green on “Exploiting Southwest Airlines with Customer Satisfaction and Complete Misfortune” [Comment on Airline Cancellations]
The airline’s chief commercial officer, Ryan Green, has offered his regrets over the collapse of services, promising to rebuild customer relations that have sunk to rock bottom.
In a video released Thursday, Green said that his personal apology was the first step of making things right after a lot of plans changed.
We’re continuing to work to make it up to you, and you’ll hear about that soon. But for now, we’re focused on restoring the reliability and level of customer experience we expect of ourselves, and you expect of us.”
His remarks, which follow earlier apologies from airline CEO Jordan, came as Buttigieg made his own scathing assessment Southwest’s troubles, calling the situation a complete “meltdown.”
It’s just part of the course. This is flight travel, everyone’s trying to get everywhere at the same time. Southwest took the largest amount of travel misfortune this year, according to Roderic Hister.
When asked what he thought about the lack of lines at the Southwest counters at the airport, Hister said: “Maybe speaks to the improvements that they’re trying to make, because there’s not long lines, people aren’t here complaining. So, maybe you know, the efforts to redeem themselves are working.”
Winston Williams, standing near Hister, said he intends to still use the airline in the future. “I like Southwest. The bags are free to use, Williams said.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/southwest-flight-cancellations-friday/index.html
The Southwest Airlines Breakdown: A Perfect Storm for the Company, as Sensitive as It Has Been, but Nobody Has Arrived
They and the airline said that an internal process requires multiple departments to manually redesign the airline’s schedule — and that it works “the vast majority” of the time.
When something goes wrong, the Southwest software — including the crew scheduling system tool — leaves much of the work of rebuilding that delicate network to be done manually.
During her time as secretary of transportation in the Trump administration, Elaine Chao said that the Southwest Airlines breakdown was a failure of unbelievable proportions.
She told CNN that it was a perfect storm of events for the company. She stated it would take them a long time to rebuild trust with consumers.
“It is going to take a long time for Southwest Airlines to earn back public trust. While the extreme weather affected other airlines, Southwest experienced a true meltdown at the worst possible time,” he said Thursday in an email to CNN Travel.
“Do a few Google searches such as ‘free things to do near me.’ I doubt Southwest is going to reimburse tours or other paid activities, so I would not book any expensive excursions that you cannot afford.”
Airfares rarely have last-minute deals, unlike hotels or cruise cabins where you might find great last-minute deals.
“Planes are routinely 90-95%, even 100% full on a normal day these days. And demand right now is about as high as it gets. [We’re] heading into the New Year, plus the storm has added to that,” he told NPR.
“I really think part of what we’re seeing play out here is less about the price itself and more about record-high awareness of these pricing patterns,” Potter said. Hundreds of thousands, even millions, of Americans are scrambling to find a last minute ticket on another carrier. Plenty more are just looking out of curiosity.”
Airlines use complicated mathematical formulas to set their prices. […] She said that the factor that was the most important for the price paid was demand.
“Airlines sell certain fares that are not included in the lowest fare class in the last days before a flight, so that they don’t have to make other changes, such as crew or flight changes,” Potter said.
Potter said you should check the fare with the airline’s website. Sometimes clicking through might reveal it as a business or first-class ticket.
Sometimes an airline will add back a cheaper seat when they make crew schedules or flight changes, so you should check the options again.
NPR asked the airlines to include a list of impacted cities and ceilings for the caps. They didn’t explain their policies. The highly competitive aviation industry requires a lack of price transparency.
If you think airlines are mistreating you can file a consumer protection complaint with USDOT. The number was described by the department as “surging”, despite them not being able to provide specific complaint numbers.
The Biden administration wants to change US law so that airlines have to give a full refund after a cancellation.