Southwest Drops a Holiday Ad So Tone-Deaf It Should Come With Earplugs

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Airlines are in the business of getting as many passengers as possible. To help them reach their goals of filling their planes, they advertise seemingly everywhere. You’ll see their ads on television. On social media. If you still listen to terrestrial radio or have a magazine subscription, you might even encounter ads for airlines there, too.

Since airlines require you to have an email address to make a reservation, be a member of their frequent flyer program, etc., it’s only natural that you’ll receive advertising from them in your inbox, as well.

Southwest is no stranger to advertising via email. Here’s their most recent, which a reader of ours forwarded to us after they received it late last week:

What the…???

And I’ve just got to ask, who on earth at Southwest’s advertising team decided that this particular ad would be a good thing?

Southwest was, of course, the airline that had a major scheduling crisis in late December 2022. On various days between December 21st and 30th, the airline cancelled thousands upon thousands of flights, and thousands of others were delayed for hours. On December 27th alone, 64% of Southwest’s flights were cancelled.

Here’s how the crisis was described on Wikipedia:

Throughout the crisis, a substantial number of passengers were left stranded at airports across the Southwest route network seeking alternative flights or modes of transportation, with multi-hour wait times for rental car counters a common occurrence. Passengers seeking to purchase tickets on competing carriers encountered substantial price hikes due to increased demand, before some carriers announced temporary price caps on certain routes. Many Southwest crews found themselves competing with stranded passengers for scarce hotel rooms and ground transportation, with no help from the company.

All told, thanks to their operational failures, the airline cancelled 16,900 flights and stranded over two million passengers over the 2022 Christmas holiday and into the New Year.

The DOT wound up penalizing Southwest $140 million for the shutdown, and during December 2023, the airline’s CEO, Bob Jordan, vowed that Southwest would not have a repeat of the previous year’s meltdown (and they didn’t – although several hundred flights were cancelled in late December 2023. But those were due to adverse weather conditions that were out of Southwest’s control).

How could they think this was OK?

But still, considering that Christmas was ruined for thousands upon thousands of Southwest passengers in 2022, how do they get off sending an ad like this to people?

“We’ll get you home?”

“Count on us to get you home for the holiday??”

“The lowest cancellation rate” based on US DOT Air Travel Consumer Reports for full-year 2023 and 2024 and the first half of 2025???

I see what they’re trying to do, but…

OK, I could see that they want to show how much better they’re doing. They want to show that you can trust them.

This is not the way to do that.

I mean, are they THAT tone deaf? Did they just “forget” 2022? Did they think their passengers forgot 2022, when they had to rent a car and drive 18 hours to get home? Or spent Christmas at an airport? Or couldn’t get back to their job for an extra week because they were stuck on the other side of the country?

If there was ever an airline ad that was in poor taste, this was it.

*** Many thanks to Mike for sharing

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