The Southwest Airlines Holiday Cancellation Counts, Baggage Collection, and Staff Recuperation Strikes during the Fourth of July Flight Season
“Southwest and other airlines got smaller at the beginning of the epidemic when travel fell off a cliff, and they have struggled since, even as travel has rebounded to grow back up to 100%,” Potter said.
Out of the 2,714 cancellations already made for Wednesday flights within, into or out of the United States as of 3:15 a.m. ET, 2,504 of them are operated by Southwest, according to flight tracking website FlightAware . The website shows that the airline canceled another 2,356 flights on Thursday.
Problems with connecting flight crews to their schedules are one of the problems that have made it hard for the airline to accommodate the holiday rush. That issue makes it hard for employees to get crew scheduling services.
If you are stuck on Southwest and need to get somewhere, you should try to get a flight with another airline right now, said Kyle Potter in an email to CNN Travel.
“This is really as bad as it gets for an airline,” Potter said. We’ve seen this many times over the last year or so when airlines have trouble especially after a storm, but there’s clear skies across the country.
Long lines of travelers attempting to rebook or make connections were witnessed at Southwest ticket counters at multiple US airports on Tuesday, while huge piles of unclaimed bags continued to grow as passengers struggled to reclaim their luggage in airports including Chicago’s Midway International, Harry Reid in Las Vegas and William P. Hobby Airport in Houston.
Southwest spokesperson Jay McVay said in a news conference at Houston’s William P. Hobby Airport on Monday night the airline will do everything possible to right the challenges passengers have experienced, including “hotels, ride assistance, vans … rental cars to try and make sure these folks get home as quickly as possible.”
Thousands of Delta pilots picketed at major airports this summer, calling for higher pay and highlighting staff concerns as passengers faced flight cancellations during the Fourth of July holiday rush. The pilots of Delta voted last month to authorize a strike when negotiations for a new contract were paused.
The Loss of Southwest Airlines During the Tuesday Flight Cancellation: Jay McVay explains how the airline will respond quickly to passengers in the e-mail
Air travelers who are hoping for a clear skies on Tuesday will need to wait at least a few more days, particularly if they are flying with Southwest Airlines.
Denver International is the airport most affected by the Tuesday cancellation.
Southwest Airlines CEO Bob Jordan told the Wall Street Journal the company plans to operate just over a third of its schedule in upcoming days to give itself the ability for crews to get into the right positions.
“We had a tough day today. “We’ll have another difficult day tomorrow and we’ll be able to get out of this.” Jordan told WSJ.com in an interview.
CNN’s Carlos Suarez spoke with frustrated passengers in line at the Southwest ticket counter at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport on Monday afternoon.
Customers who called Southwest’s customer service were unable to speak to a representative due to the inability of the calls to go through. Southwest told CNN it is “fully staffed to answer calls.”
If you’ve been left in the lurch and your efforts to reach a customer service agent are going nowhere, the founder of Scott’s Cheap Flights suggests trying an international number.
“The main hotline for US airlines will be clogged with other passengers getting rebooked. To get through to an agent quickly, you should call any of the airline’s international offices.
As the storm swept across the country, it had an impact on many of the larger stations, and as a result, Jay McVay stated at the press conference at the Houston’s William P. Hobby Airport.
Flight crews and airplanes that are not in the cities they need to be in will not be able to run our operations, because they are out of place.
McVay said that the company’s first priority right now is safety. “We want to make sure that we operate these flights safely and that we have the flight crews that have legal and sufficient time to operate these flights,” he stated.
“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’re already gone, McVay advises you to take care of yourself and keep your receipts. “We will make sure they are taken care of, that’s not a question.”
Southwest Airlines Cancellation Policy and Intercity Bus Service Annihilation During the December 17 Reopening, Says a CNN Associated Report
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. Southwest would provide buses to the area hotels and they would have rooms for all the affected customers, the agent said.
The Department will look at the cancellation situation and see if Southwest is complying with its customer service plan.
Southwest Airlines has had problems for a long time, according to the president of the Southwest Airlines Pilots Association, in a call with CNN on Monday.
“We’ve been having these issues for the past 20 months,” he said. “We’ve witnessed these sort of meltdowns happening more and more frequently due to the fact that there are too many outdated processes and outdated IT.”
“It’s phones, it’s computers, it’s processing power, it’s the programs used to connect us to airplanes – that’s where the problem lies, and it’s systemic throughout the whole airline,” he said.
— In hard-hit western New York, Buffalo International Airport said in its most recent tweet that it does not plan to resume passenger flights before 11 a.m. ET Wednesday, pushing back the expected reopening by another 24 hours later than previously anticipated.
— Greyhound, the largest provider of intercity bus service, issued a service alert on Monday afternoon stating many of its scheduled services in the upper northeast will be canceled or disrupted until further notice due to winter weather. Buffalo, Cleveland and Syracuse are affected.
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.
The Utilities of Southwest Airlines: Why their Uncertainty is Creating the Disruption and What They’re Doing
The phone system the company uses is not working, according to the President of TWU Local 556. “They’re just not manned with enough manpower in order to give the scheduling changes to flight attendants, and that’s created a ripple effect that is creating chaos throughout the nation.”
“Part of what we’re suffering is a lack of tools,” Southwest CEO Bob Jordan told employees in a memo obtained by CNN. “We’ve talked an awful lot about modernizing the operation, and the need to do that.”
Jordan stated that part of the problem was a lack of tools. “We’ve talked an awful lot about modernizing the operation, and the need to do that.”
Gary Kelly, then-CEO, said on a call with analysts that the company had made some changes to prevent a similar situation from happening again.
“We have reined in our capacity plans to adjust to the current staffing environment, and our ontime performance has improved, accordingly,” said Kelly on October 21. Currently, we’re close to the halfway point of our goal of 5,000 new employees by the end of the year.
The airline said in a statement that it will be flying about one-third of its schedule for the next several days as it continues to recover.
Southwest’s old scheduling system has not changed much since the 1990s. Chief Operating Officer Andrew Watterson told employees this week that the outdated scheduling system was the main culprit for the outage.
That failure has attracted the attention of Congress. On Tuesday, Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., chair of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, released a statement saying the committee would look into “the causes of these disruptions and its impact to customers.”
On Thursday last week, Taylor McClain’s morning flight from Salt Lake City into Chicago Midway was canceled. He was re booked for 3p.m. and did not leave until 9p.m.
McClain’s return to Utah has been even worse. He was scheduled to leave Chicago late Monday. It was called off. Now, the soonest he’s been able to reschedule is for Thursday night.
Bringing Southwest’s Internal Software System to the Forgetting Stage: A Comment on Helane Becker, Managing Director of Cowen Aviation
He is lucky to be with his parents, but he will spend a lot of time on vacation and pay for additional kennel fees for the dog he can’t get back to.
Helane Becker, an aviation analyst with Cowen, an investment bank and financial services company, says Southwest needs to bring those tools, in the form of internal software systems, up to date.
Becker says, “It’s not only their customer-facing systems, it’s their crew scheduling and so on.” Southwest has been slow to catch up when it comes to technology.
Southwest relies heavily on shorter, point-to-point flights rather than a hub and spoke model of many of its competitors. In fair weather, it’s a system that has worked well for them. But in inclement weather, it can cause problems, says Kathleen Bangs, a former commercial airline pilot and spokesperson for FlightAware.
“What you’re doing with Southwest is, you’re checking a bag from the first city to the second city, and then rechecking it into the third city,” he said. “Whereas with American, Delta or United, you’re checking a bag from the origin city all the way to the destination.”
An Airline Traveler in New York City Cancellates a Flight with a Loss of the Flight Permittia: The Denver Dad’s Case
As a result, “when you get a weather situation like this, you have all sorts of pilots and flight attendants that can no longer get to where they need to be, because quite often flight crews are not based at the same city or they don’t live at the same city that they’re based out of,” she says. Things tend to get out of position when there is bad weather.
A person who lives in Denver with his wife and two young children is one of those passengers. The family was visiting New York City, where they were celebrating together — a wedding anniversary and his daughter’s birthday.
The family flew out on the 21st, and planned to fly home on Christmas Eve. Just before they departed for the airport, Lenz checked his phone app “to make sure everything was good.”
It wasn’t good. The flight was canceled. He was on the phone for hours, but couldn’t reach an agent. So, he used an app on his phone to rebook — for Dec. 28. He finally reached an agent on Monday. Do you think this will be solved by the time we leave?
The agent reassured him, and even moved the flight to the 27th. He says his Tuesday flight was canceled at that point.
Source: https://www.npr.org/2022/12/27/1145616523/southwest-airlines-flight-cancellations-2022
On the Southwest Airlines “Service Debale,” CEO Jordan, and a Case Study with a Family of Twins in Wichita, Kansas
Finally, the family decided to rent a car and drive back to Denver — a 26-hour drive. “There’s a place about halfway through in Illinois that’s 13 hours from here and 13 hours from from Denver. The goal was to take a quick break at the hotel so that we could be there on Thursday night.
However, analysts believe that Southwest’s service debacle isn’t related to the taxpayer assistance the airline received in 2020. Although it is obviously bad for travelers, the billions of dollars taxpayers pay to Southwest could not be used to solve the particular problems that caused this week’s glitch.
But industry analyst Potter says the airlines’ failures mean customers end up paying the price. As long as the carriers are allowed to keep running their razor thin margins, there will continue to be mass delayed and canceled flights.
Buttigieg says he spoke directly to Southwest CEO Bob Jordan on Tuesday about the thousands of flights that have been canceled this week with no immediate indication of when passengers can rebook.
“I made clear that our department will be holding them accountable for their responsibilities to customers, both to get them through this situation and to make sure that this can’t happen again.”
Passenger Trisha Jones told CNN at the airport in Atlanta that she and her partner had been traveling for five days, trying to get home to Wichita, Kansas, after disembarking from a cruise at Fort Lauderdale, Florida.
“We were fortunate, because we were in Fort Lauderdale — my family lives in the Tampa bay area so we were able to rent a car to go see my family for Christmas,” Jones said. There are a lot of families who are sleeping on the floor.
Airlines are Trying to Take the Heat off of the Holiday Season: Southwest Airlines Rethinks its Farewell to Passengers in the Aftermath of the Mass Annihilation
The secretary told the CEO that he expects Southwest to offer refunds and expense reimbursement to the passengers who have been affected.
On Tuesday, the Democratic Senators stated that they would like Southwest to issue a “significant monetary compensation” to customers who have had holidays ruined.
“While all of the other parts of the aviation system have been moving toward recovery and getting better each day, it’s actually been moving the opposite direction with this airline,” said Buttigieg.
The statement suggested that Jordan did not see a lot of changes in Southwest’s procedures in the wake of the mass cancellation.
“The tools we use to recover from disruption serve us well 99% of the time, but clearly we need to double-down on our already-existing plans to upgrade systems for these extreme circumstances so that we never again face what’s happening right now,” said Jordan.
“Every airline in the country is jam-packed right now, so your odds of even finding a seat — let alone at an even halfway decent price — get smaller by the hour,” Potter said.
“Travelers in the thick of this should be sure to save all their receipts: other flights, a rental car, nights at the hotel, meals, anything,” Potter said.
The price caps vary by location in areas affected by cancellations, an American Airlines spokesperson told CNN. Southwest did not respond to CNN’s request for comment.
A traveler posted a photo of a flight with multiple airlines that cost over $2,000. A passenger was looking to rebook a flight.
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 a small number of cities to make sure we can serve as many customers as possible.
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.
What the Southwest Airlines Payroll Support Program (PSP) Learned about the Post 2020 Coronavirus Pandemic Impact on the Transportation Industry
When the coronavirus pandemic ground the transportation industry to a screeching halt in early 2020, the US government doled out more than $54 billion in aid to help pay employees and keep the systems from buckling.
Southwest Airlines got $7billion from the program. But its system had two major meltdowns in the past 18 months, including this week’s massive system failure the likes of which the aviation industry has never seen.
[The pandemic aid] “is water under the bridge at this point,” said Robert Mann, a Port Washington, New York-based airline industry analyst. The only distinguishing factors at this point are the degree carriers’ obligations to return to paying dividends or pay higher officer salaries.
When air travel plummeted in the early years of 2020 the government stepped in to help the airlines. Preventing layoffs and furloughs in the transportation sector was a critical focal point as employees such as pilots are subject to training requirements and other certifications that, if lagged, could significantly disrupt air travel for a considerable time.
The Payroll Support Program, which started in March 2020 and was reupped two times in 2021, was similar in nature to the Payroll Protection Program that was meant to help smaller businesses keep employees paid and working during the pandemic.
The federal aid to airlines, which was a mix of grants and loans, came with some caveats: The airlines had to use the funds exclusively to continue paying wages, salaries and benefits to employees; and, for specific periods of time, they couldn’t conduct furloughs or layoffs; issue dividends or stock buybacks; or increase pay for executives.
“It worked,” Gary Kelly, Southwest’s former chief executive officer, said in December 2021 during a Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation hearing to examine the impact of the PSP.
“Funds received through each round of the PSP were only used for qualifying employee salaries, wages, and benefits,” he added. We didn’t reduce pay rates or hours, we didn’t cut benefits, and we didn’t lay off people. The minimum wage was raised to fifteen dollars an hour on August 1, 2021.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/28/business/southwest-pandemic-aid-meltdown/index.html
The Southwest Airlines Case for Pre-pandemic Aid Meltdown: A Secretary of Homeland Security Examined with the Program for Safe Harbor
Kelly noted that Southwest’s financially conservative approach that put it in a healthy position entering 2020, and the airline’s cost-cutting throughout the pandemic, had it on good footing for the future.
Two House Democrats asked the inspector general for the Treasury Department to investigate whether any money from the Program for Safe Harbor was used to buy out workers at Southwest Airlines when it experienced staffing shortages and service disruptions.
The amounts were based on carriers salary levels pre-pandemic flying levels. In April 2020, airline passenger traffic plummeted 96% and stayed 60% below 2019 levels in 2020, according to the US Government Accountability Office.
Mann said that no carrier was operating a level of flying in 2019. Several carriers cut hours and pay despite saying they would not be laying off employees. Many others initiated voluntary separation agreements that paid fewer hours and salary dollars over a defined future period in exchange for early retirements or similar.”
He said it could have been as simple as fuel and interest payments. “But the idea that PSP would have paid for IT upgrades that a carrier saw no need for is not realistic.”
“Now that the problem has occurred, and at [the Department of Transportation] and the market’s urging, I suspect the carrier has a different view of what IT upgrades are necessary,” he said. They will invest their own money to research, develop and implement new systems.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/28/business/southwest-pandemic-aid-meltdown/index.html
Flying with Southwest: Reply to the Sen. Murray on Intergovernmental Regulations for Holiday Cancellation and Exit from the Airline
The Democratic Senators sent a new letter on Tuesday to the Southwest CEO asking for compensation for holiday cancellation.
He said that after days of trying to operate as much of a full schedule as possible, they decided to reduce flying to catch up.
Buttigieg denounced the practices as “unacceptable” and threatened to hold the airline to its stated intentions.
“We’re going to expect them to go beyond the letter of the law in terms of how they treat passengers, making sure they pay for things like hotels, ground travel expenses, meals and of course, refunds,” Buttigieg said.
They were free to use their own devices. Alluding to. He told NPR’s Morning Edition, “They hadn’t been given the tools to do their job, and they hadn’t been given the leadership to answer questions and provide solutions.”
The airline industry has long been wary of regulations, saying that they ultimately put the cost burden on the customer. And Murray agrees that Southwest is better suited than, say, the DOT, to decide what needs to change.
Congress is also watching whether the airline will compensate customers. The Senate Commerce Committee will investigate, according to the chair.
If your flight is canceled, you are entitled to a prompt cash refund for all the money you paid, plus any extra purchases such as bag fees or a seat assignment.
Southwest says that all customers traveling through Jan. 2, 2023 have the option to rebook or travel standby without fees. The company has a special portal that can be used to process cash payments.
A meltdown like the size of Southwest Airlines: The case of Bri Murphy and her husband Peter Ferguson, the lead officer of the American Economic Liberties Project
“I’ve never seen a meltdown of this size, it’s the worst I think we’ve ever seen,” said William J. McGee, a senior fellow for Aviation and Travel at the American Economic Liberties Project.
Everyone who has been affected by the airline’s problems should know that we’re doing everything we can to keep the airline running. Please also hear that I’m truly sorry.
Bri Murphy, and her husband, Peter Ferguson, planned to fly from Nashville to Denver on Christmas Day. The pair watched Southwest delay their flight and eventually cancel it. Now, they’re waiting to get on another flight.
The luggage they used did make it to Denver without them. Murphy’s father-in-law, who lives in Denver, was able to drive to the airport and find two of their suitcases. But a third — containing Christmas gifts and Murphy’s medication — is still somewhere in the pile.
And while Murphy waits to be reunited with her suitcase, she continues to rack up hundreds of dollars in costs, transporting herself to and from the airport and replacing some of her belongings.
Source: https://www.npr.org/2022/12/29/1145846556/unclaimed-luggage-flight-cancellations-winter-storm-southwest
The airline point-to-point system: What will we learn from the airport baggage claim? A letter to the editor of the L.J. McGee press release
The point-to-point system, in which planes fly from one smaller airport to another, used to be the norm for airlines until the federal government deregulated airlines in 1978. Now, most major airlines instead follow a hub-and-spoke system where routes are connected to a major hub.
“After a summer of flight cancellations, delays, and withheld refunds, eliminating the airlines’ liability shield will shift the power back to consumers, state AGs, and state courts and legislatures, forcing the airlines to finally stop mistreating and cheating flyers,” McGee said in a press release announcing the model legislation.
She was able to take a different flight after her flight from Denver to Chicago was canceled.
Although the airline told her that her bags would be waiting for her in Chicago, the airtags, a tracking device by Apple, on her luggage — containing winter clothes, Christmas presents and her prescription medicine — showed that that they were still in Denver. She suspects they are buried under the bags that litter the airport baggage claim.
She said that she was one of millions who were waiting in the corporate machine to get an answer. We don’t have that much power. I’m just waiting until a few days have passed so I can get another update on my luggage. I have written off all of it.