Southwest Airlines in a nationwide meltdown

[Anonymous]

I’m going back to Reddit where people are offering to drop off formula and diapers for stranded babies instead or listening to this one a-hole talk about no one should “risk” flying around Christmas time.

[Anonymous]

I'm so sorry for all who are affected by this. Being stranded in an airport with no recourse is so incredibly frustrating.

This episode is going to hurt SW for a long time. My oldest left for college this fall and SW has one of the few direct flights to the area. I have paid a premium to keep him on American. And still have experienced some long delays. But nothing like this. I can't imagine ever using SW after this.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I'm so sorry for all who are affected by this. Being stranded in an airport with no recourse is so incredibly frustrating.

This episode is going to hurt SW for a long time. My oldest left for college this fall and SW has one of the few direct flights to the area. I have paid a premium to keep him on American. And still have experienced some long delays. But nothing like this. I can't imagine ever using SW after this.

I will totally use SW after this. And if there is ever an unexpected occurrence I will book my rental car or hotel right away. Definitely not paying extra for an extremely rare occurrence.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I’m going back to Reddit where people are offering to drop off formula and diapers for stranded babies instead or listening to this one a-hole talk about no one should “risk” flying around Christmas time.

Reading comprehension? Storm plus busy holiday. Do you really think that it is reasonable to expect that given those two factors that it would just be typical travel weekend?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:After a canceled flight from sea to bwi on Alaska on Sunday, I rebooked on sw for Thursday, then I panic booked another flight on United for Friday. Think I should even try to take the Thursday sw flight? Or just cancel it now and take the Friday flight. It’s an early morning flight and I’m solo with a toddler so I’d hate to get to sea and have it cancel then, which is what happened to us on Sunday. Ughhh I just want to get home!

I would assume.the Thursday SW flight will be cancelled. They probably won't be flying a near normal schedule until Sunday/Monday.[/quotin

Thanks for sharing your thoughts! Sigh.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I'm so sorry for all who are affected by this. Being stranded in an airport with no recourse is so incredibly frustrating.

This episode is going to hurt SW for a long time. My oldest left for college this fall and SW has one of the few direct flights to the area. I have paid a premium to keep him on American. And still have experienced some long delays. But nothing like this. I can't imagine ever using SW after this.

I will totally use SW after this. And if there is ever an unexpected occurrence I will book my rental car or hotel right away. Definitely not paying extra for an extremely rare occurrence.

I will also use SW after this, because hopefully others stop using it and the flights will be less crowded.

[Anonymous]

I’ve never flown Southwest. Why do so many people choose this airline?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I’m going back to Reddit where people are offering to drop off formula and diapers for stranded babies instead or listening to this one a-hole talk about no one should “risk” flying around Christmas time.

Reading comprehension? Storm plus busy holiday. Do you really think that it is reasonable to expect that given those two factors that it would just be typical travel weekend?

Every other airline is handling it much better. I am trying to get to a family reunion so I know lots of people have had delays during the storm but no one has had delays since the storm or lost access to their luggage (even for canceled flights) anywhere near what Southwest has. The storm was over days ago and Southwest is still canceling half their schedule or more, possibly all week.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I am no expert, but why can't Southwest just cancel every flight for one day, fly all the planes and crew to where they need to be for the next day, and then just resume normal operations? It seems like they are snowballing their problem by flying such a reduced schedule for so long. According to them the issue not weather (any more) or staffing, but just locations of planes and staff. So take a day to reset and move on. I don't get why that's so hard.

I was on one of the few Southwest flights that actually took off from DCA today (DCA to MCO). From what we could see at DCA, it looked like the flights that were still in operation were helping crew and pilots get to where they needed to be. The aircraft we took to MCO was incoming from Atlanta, and it didn’t have any passengers on it - just a flight attendants and pilots. And there were multiple pilots and flight attendants in the seats on our DCA-MCO flight.

Also for anyone reading this who has a flight tomorrow and beyond, if your flight isn’t cancelled already by the morning of, there’s a chance you might actually make it out. If you have any reasonable backup plan, though, it’s worth thinking through in advance.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I'm so sorry for all who are affected by this. Being stranded in an airport with no recourse is so incredibly frustrating.

This episode is going to hurt SW for a long time. My oldest left for college this fall and SW has one of the few direct flights to the area. I have paid a premium to keep him on American. And still have experienced some long delays. But nothing like this. I can't imagine ever using SW after this.

Everyone says that until there next trip. You don't have a lot of options when it comes to flying. And 99% of people will say they will never fly SW again, and then they will realize that paying more money is not worth keeping a ridiculous promise.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I’m going back to Reddit where people are offering to drop off formula and diapers for stranded babies instead or listening to this one a-hole talk about no one should “risk” flying around Christmas time.

Reading comprehension? Storm plus busy holiday. Do you really think that it is reasonable to expect that given those two factors that it would just be typical travel weekend?

Every other airline is handling it much better. I am trying to get to a family reunion so I know lots of people have had delays during the storm but no one has had delays since the storm or lost access to their luggage (even for canceled flights) anywhere near what Southwest has. The storm was over days ago and Southwest is still canceling half their schedule or more, possibly all week.

They are set up differently with aircraft and how they move/utilize them as I posted above and their system crashed which I also about. There are plenty of airports that southwest doesn't even serve that have cancelations and several hundred delays. Maybe other airlines are handling it better but my point is, that as a whole, for the most part this was not an unforeseen event.

Also expecting every airline to be impacted the same, therefore needing to handle it the same is a little naïve.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I’ve never flown Southwest. Why do so many people choose this airline?

Also wondering this.

I have miles with United and American so I mainly use those, though sometimes will fly Delta. But I've never tried Southwest, I don't know why.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I think people need to grow up. The storm didn't pop up out of nowhere. You knew the storm was coming you knew it was a busy travel period. You fly Southwest because of the price. The prices are typically cheaper because they don't have several extra aircraft like the legacy carriers, and they don't utilize the hub and spoke model like many of the legacy carriers. They also don't have the luxury of the smaller regional jet partners.

You flew when you knew there would be bad weather and a busy holiday week. Then you say they should have preemptively done more, but no can say what that more is.
Imagine the S show and S slinging that would be going on if they had preemptively canceled all flights and then the storm turned out not be as bad as was predicted. Which if we are Monday morning quarterbacking is what they should have done. And then everyone would be shedding tears about how they didn't get to see XYZ and Southwest ruined million of peoples holiday.

There system went down. Have you never dealt with a system outage at your work. The scale of the company is why it is on the news. If it was Jim Bobs Air Charter Service and he ran on SalesForce and that went down, it wouldn't be the top news story.

Clearly you haven’t read a single news article explaining the issues going on. [/quote

I have, still doesn't change the fact that people were rolling the dice on risky travel period. A literal and figurative snowball occurred across a large swath of the country. There system crashed. What part am I not getting right?

Midway is an S show for Southwest right now. Ohare is an S show for other airlines right now.

At BWI there were roughly 150 flights schedule today. SouthWest has about 2/3s of those. Of course their lines are going to be exceptionally long when something like this happens. Same as at Midway.

My Southwest flight left Albuquerque on Wednesday the 21st, through Dallas to DCA, before the storm. My return flight was supposed to leave DCA on Monday (two days after the storm that didn't really affect DCA ended), through Houston (no lingering storm effects) to Albuquerque (no storm at all).

Am I not supposed to travel anywhere that might possibly be affected by weather ever? I purposefully chose routes that were less likely to be affected by winter weather.

Read the news, PP. The Southwest meltdown came AFTER THE STORM. It is STILL GOING ON because it was NOT ABOUT SNOW. It was about crappy tech, outdated systems and mismanagement.

In other words, it was NOT MY FAULT.

I love NM during the holidays!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I’ve never flown Southwest. Why do so many people choose this airline?

Also wondering this.

I have miles with United and American so I mainly use those, though sometimes will fly Delta. But I've never tried Southwest, I don't know why.

They are the largest domestic airline! They have a huge network and in particular fly to a ton of places nonstop from BWI.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I’ve never flown Southwest. Why do so many people choose this airline?

Also wondering this.

I have miles with United and American so I mainly use those, though sometimes will fly Delta. But I've never tried Southwest, I don't know why.

They are the largest domestic airline! They have a huge network and in particular fly to a ton of places nonstop from BWI.

Except for Christmas week, don't travel that week!