Southwest Airlines has been in a downward spiral since the huge amounts of snow, wind, ice and bitter cold covered the majority of the continental U.S. in the days before Christmas.
According to FlightAware, multiple airlines canceled U.S. flights – over 6,000 of them – between Wednesday and Friday of last week. More than 21,000 other flights were delayed during the same time frame. Christmas Eve saw nearly 3,500 cancellations. Even as late as Christmas Day, over 3,000 flights were canceled and about 6,800 were were delayed.
But by Monday the 26th, the weather had calmed considerably, most airports had shoveled out their tarmacs and if it wasn’t “business as usual” for most airlines, it was at least close.
Except for Southwest, who canceled close to 3,000 flights that day – about 70% of its schedule for the day. By Monday night, the Department of Transportation (USDOT) even became involved:
You can read Southwest’s customer service plan here: https://t.co/2vmG9v9nK5
— TransportationGov (@USDOT) December 27, 2022
USDOT is concerned by Southwest’s unacceptable rate of cancellations and delays & reports of lack of prompt customer service. The Department will examine whether cancellations were controllable and if Southwest is complying with its customer service plan.
You can read Southwest’s customer service plan here:
https://www.southwest.com/assets/pdfs/corporate-commitments/customer-service-plan.pdf?clk=7396032
By this (Tuesday) afternoon, Southwest had already canceled more than 2,500 flights for today, and nearly 2,500 are already canceled for Wednesday. “Only” 15% of the carrier’s flights are canceled for Thursday (but hey, the day is sill young).
Southwest customers are taking to social media. They’re complaining loudly about long lines to speak with representatives at the nation’s airports, problems with lost bags and excessive wait times (10 hours!) or busy signals on the airline’s customer service telephone lines. Meanwhile, photos and video posted to social media showed bags piling up at airports across the country.
So what happened? If you ask Southwest, this is what they say:
In a 12/25 statement (quoted on 12/26 by CNN) by Southwest CEO Bob Jordan:
On Christmas night, ahead of Monday’s meltdown, Jordan told employees the airline has “a lot of issues in the operation right now.”
CNN was provided a transcript of the message to Southwest employees by an aviation source.
Jordan told employees, “Part of what we’re suffering is a lack of tools. We’ve talked an awful lot about modernizing the operation, and the need to do that.”
In a 12/26 statement to NPR:
Southwest spokesperson Chris Perry told NPR the airline’s disruptions are a result of the winter storm’s lingering effects, adding that it hopes to “stabilize and improve its operation” with more favorable weather conditions.
Other issues that have exacerbated the airline’s struggle to accommodate the holiday rush include problems with “connecting flight crews to their schedules,” Perry said. That issue has made it difficult for employees to access crew scheduling services and get reassignments.
In a 12/26 social media statement on their website:
“With consecutive days of extreme winter weather across our network behind us, continuing challenges are impacting our customers and employees in a significant way that is unacceptable. As we continue the work to recover our operation, we have made the decision to continue operating a reduced schedule by flying roughly one third of our schedule for the next several days.”
In a 12/27 report on NBC News:
“Southwest blamed ‘operational challenges’ that followed days of severe winter weather across most of the country and said that it was fully staffed ahead of the holiday.
‘These operational conditions forced daily changes to our flight schedule at a volume and magnitude that still has the tools our teams use to recover the airline operating at capacity,’ the airline said.”
When Southwest has made statements about their operational meltdown, the story has been fairly consistent:
- They initially got behind the 8 ball because of the weather
- They’re now having challenges scheduling flight crew onto flights due to capacity issues of scheduling tools. Their CEO suggested it was due to a lack of “modernizing [of] the operation.”
In other words, at first it was weather. But then when so many flight attendants and pilots tried to get reassigned at the same time, they broke their own ancient software.
Meanwhile, what do Southwest employees say? These are some quotes I’ve found on the internet. Many are anonymous already but if not, I’ve intentionally not included names.
I’m well aware any or all of these may or may not be legit. But I purposely included the ones that seem to gel with what Southwest has said.
From Facebook:
My friend’s husband is a pilot with Southwest. He just posted this an hour ago. I’m not including his name or the photos he shared of packed SWA employee rooms at the airports over the past couple of days (in case his post comes back to bite him with the company—even though he’s stating facts.) He also posted a screenshot of a fellow pilot on hold with SWA Scheduling for over 22 hours. Anyway, here’s some insight for those wondering if this massive round of SWA cancellations is really all due to weather and staffing issues:
“I don’t know what to say. Southwest Airlines has imploded. Their antiquated software system has completely fried. Planes are parked. Crews are stranded in the airports with the passengers, volunteering to take the passengers in the parked planes but the software won’t accept it. Phone lines are overwhelmed for both passenger and crews. I personally spent over two hours trying to get ahold of anyone in the company last night after midnight. A Captain and I did manage to get the one flight put together on Christmas night and got people home. Kudos to the ops agent and dispatcher for making it happen. We had to manually input a lot of the data and it took over an hour to coordinate with dispatch going back and forth running numbers.
We spent hours trying to get the company to answer and get us a hotel when we landed as they’re all sold out. We were only put in a call que for hours before hanging up. I found one hotel with 4 rooms and we bought our own rooms at 2:30am. I even paid for a Flight Attendants room. We literally have crews sleeping on the airport floors all over the country with nowhere to go. Crews have been calling to fly anyone, anywhere, but the company says the system needs a reset. They have effectively shut down the operations for the rest of year, running 1/3 of the flights so that they can let the computer find and locate the crews and aircraft. Gate agents are in tears. They’ve been yelled at, cussed at, slapped and spit on. Flight attendants have been taking a beating. The frontline employees have had little support or communication. Terminals are standing room only with people having been there for days. Pilot lounges are packed with pilots ready to fly and nowhere to go.
Embarrassing is an understatement. I’m going on my second of three days off, still stuck on the east coast and still expected to show up in the morning with no schedule. And I’m willing to fly all day if needed. Because that’s nothing compared to the passengers needing meds in bags that are lost and mothers traveling with kids, having been stuck for the same amount of days in the terminal. In 24 years, I’ve never seen anything like this. Heads need to roll! Rumors on media are floating that there is a lack of crews and pilots are staging sick calls. Absolutely not true at all. This is a computer system meltdown. Thousands of crew members are sitting in hotels and airports with nowhere to go. This airline has failed miserably.”
From a reply to the DOT’s Tweet (which explains why Southwest wouldn’t reschedule passengers onto other airlines’ flights):
From Reddit’s r/SouthwestAirlines subreddit:
Hey guys, SWA pilot with a little information
We’re really trying to get you guys home. I’m so sorry so many of you got this screwed over on your Christmas vacations. This is entirely managements fault. Gary Kelly, and the new CEO, and corporate barons have completely gutted the philosophy Herb believed in, which was investing in employees. They’ve known for months that many crews were stretched to the absolute limit. It was only a matter of time before something caused a cascading series of failures that spiraled out of control. The board and CEO knew this, and chose to instead give themselves multi-million dollar bonuses and threaten to fire staff, along with dragging out contract negotiations with the unions in the hopes there will be a recession. This is corporate mismanagement to a level I’ve never seen in this industry during my 25 years.
Again, I’m so sorry for your travel cancellations and the complete lack of communication from anyone who should be updating you guys and leading the charge to fix this.
EDIT: user u/4sammich in a thread I was monitoring in r/flying has a pretty good update about what is going on.
“I have friends in CS and the hotel assignment side too. There were 2 specific problems, the software for scheduling is woefully antiquated by at least 20 years. No app/internet options, all manual entry and it has settings that you DO NOT CHANGE for fear of crashing it. Those settings create the automated flow as a crewmember is moving about their day, it doesn’t know you flew the leg DAL-MCO it just assumes it and moves your piece forward. In the event of a disruption you call scheduling and they manually adjust you. It does work, it just works for an airline 1/3 the size of SWA. So the storm came and it impacted ground ops so bad that many many crews were now “unaccounted” for and the system in place couldn’t keep up. Then it happened for several more days. By Xmas evening the CS department had essentially reached the inability to do anything but simple, one off assignments. And to make matters worse, the phone system was updated not too long ago and it was not working well. Last nite they did a web form and had planned to get the system up as much as possible with what communication they could muster, however it was too much to keep up on and ultimately the method for tracking crews failed again. This 100% is at the feet of all management who refused to invest in technology updates because it is the southwest way to be stuck in 1993.”
Funny that I found out more on Reddit than from management at my own company. Really sorry again guys, I hope you all get home
Also from Reddit’s r/Southwest Airlines subreddit:
Reposting because account of original poster was deleted.
This was the post:
“On behalf of all employees: WE ARE SORRY! Couple main points:
Please be patient with us. We desperately want to do everything we can to get you where you’re going.
This sh*tstorm is because the crew scheduling software went belly up and it almost all has to be unraveled over the phone with crew members calling scheduling. If we had better technology which eliminated the need for phone calls, this would have been fixed by now.
If you are able to find alternative transportation to your final destination- DO IT. Another airline, bus, train, Lyft, rental car, ANYTHING. Southwest WILL NOT be able to get you to your destination anytime in the next few days.
Like I said, it’s gonna take at least a week to get back to normal operations for Southwest.
Don’t check your bags unless you absolutely need to, take them as carry-on.
If anyone has questions, I will try to answer them.
EDIT FOR FAQs——
Checked bags are currently a disaster. Plan to not see your checked luggage for at least a month. In the interest of 100% transparency, some bags will be 30+ days lost in the system.
Will my flight for X date go out? Next 3 days- plan on a cancellation. 4-7 days- likely to go as scheduled. 7+ days- should see operational recovery.
UPDATE FROM SOUTHWEST 12/27
If you have been impacted by a flight cancellation or significant flight delay between December 24, 2022, and January 2, 2023, you may submit receipts for consideration. We will honor reasonable requests for reimbursement for meals, hotel, and alternate transportation. https://www.southwest.com/html/air/travel-disruption https://support.southwest.com/email-us/s/
Again, It is highly advisable to find alternative transportation and submit it for reimbursement.”
Another one from Reddit’s r/Southwest Airlines subreddit:
Some thoughts
I’ve been watching the posts on here. I’m an airline pilot for another company but I fly Southwest frequently. The factors of this system failure are complex, and will take months to fully sort out. Weather was the initial trigger, but this is beyond that now. Crews and aircraft are out of place in a network structured differently than other airlines, plus reportedly aging IT systems, inability to reassign crew efficiently (my southwest pilot friend was stuck for two days on a trip unable to reach anyone), and overwhelming volume of rebookings and changes that are snowballing. But what can you do right now?
If your flight is in the next few days, I would assume it will be delayed or canceled.
If possible, drive your own car, rent a car or rebook on another airline.
Consider flying into an airport within 5 hours of your destination, and renting a car from that point. If you’re currently stranded in a city, consider driving to another.
As far as refunds outside of a flight credit, fill out the customer service contact form, and leave it alone for a week. I doubt you’ll get through to anyone right now. You can always dispute on your credit card later.
Lastly, get some food and keep drinking water. It’s easy to lose track of your personal health on days like these. And avoid ranting with other passengers. It can seem helpful at first, but I find too much and you just make yourself more stressed.
Good luck. I’m sorry this is happening to you.
It’s a mess that, it sounds like, was based on Southwest not wanting to upgrade software that should have been upgraded literally decades ago (you know how airports still use dot matrix printers? Here’s why. But not updating hardware is nothing like not updating software). Attempts to save money like that can sometimes bite you in the butt.
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