The Southwest Airlines Legacy Project: Failures in Operations after the Pandemic, as Revealed by Kyle Potter, an Executive Editor of Thrifty Traveler

Southwest got really small at the start of the Pandemic and have struggled as travel has rebounded, but they still aren’t there.

Some of the issues are caused by shorter flights with tighter turn around times.

Issues with connecting flight crews to their schedules are among the things that have made the airline’s fight to accommodate holiday rush worse. The issue has made it difficult for employees to get reassignments.

It is a task that Southwest is able to complete because of the nature of the company, according to Kyle Potter, executive editor of Thrifty Traveler.

The company said the severe weather had “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.”

From Houston, Texas, and Tampa, Fla., to Cleveland, Ohio, and Denver, Colo., passengers are sharing photos and video of overwhelmed baggage claim areas and long lines at reservation counters. At Southwest, the customer service phone line’s hold times averaged more than two hours, sometimes reaching four hours, according to Colorado Public Radio.

He says that he has flown Southwest many times but will not return to the airline until he knows how the company makes him whole.

Delta’s Cheap Flights: Why Flight Crews are Out Of Place at Hobby Airports During the July Fourth Flight Strike and Why They’re Not Closed

Thousands of Delta pilots picketed at airports this summer, calling for higher pay and highlighting staff concerns as passengers were saddled with flight cancellation during the fourth of July holiday rush. After the negotiations for a new contract were paused, Delta pilots voted to authorize a strike.

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.

Airports most affected by the Tuesday cancellations are Denver International, followed by Chicago Midway International, Baltimore/Washington International, Nashville International, Dallas Love Field and Harry Reid International Airport in Las Vegas.

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 hard day today. In all likelihood we’ll have another tough day tomorrow as we work our way out of this,” Jordan said in an interview Monday evening with WSJ.com.

CNN’s Carlos is talking to people in line at the ticket counter at the Atlanta airport.

Employees also said they have not been able to communicate with the airline, the president of the union that represents Southwest’s Flight Attendants told CNN Monday.

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, call any one of the airline’s dozens of international offices,” Scott Keyes said.

Jay McVay spoke at a press conference in Houston’s William P. Hobby Airport on Monday night about the effects of the storm on many of our larger stations.

The flight crews and airplanes that are out of place end up not being in the cities that they need to be in to continue to run our operations.

McVay said that the company’s first priority right now is safety. He stated, “We want to make sure we operate the flights safely, and that we have the flight crews that have enough time to operate these flights.”

“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 already left, take care of yourself, do what you need to do for your family, keep your receipts,” McVay relayed. We will make sure they are taken care of.

A Systematic And Systematic Analysis Of The Southwest Airlines Flight Cancellation: The Buffalo International Airport, Greyhound and Central Airports. I. On Monday, December 31

The announcement made in the terminal apologized to customers and said the next available seat would be on Saturday, December 31st. 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 US DOT stated that the agency is “concerned” about the Southwest Airlines flight cancellation.

The vice president of the Southwest Airlines Pilots Association, which represents the airline’s 10,000 pilots, said on CNN he was tired of apologizing for Southwest. Our hearts go out to all of the passengers.”

He told CNN that they had been having these issues for the past 20 months. It really is just the outdated processes and outdated IT that make these sorts of meltdowns occur.

The problem is systemic throughout the entire airline, because it is phones, computers, processing power, and programs used to connect us to airplanes.

Buffalo International Airport does not plan to resume passenger flights before 11 a.m. on Wednesday, pushing back the expected reopening by another 24 hours.

Greyhound, the largest provider of intercostal bus service, issued a service alert on Monday that most of its scheduled services in the northeastern United States will be canceled or disrupted due to 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.

Southwest Airlines, a “Pressure-Induced System Calculation Crisis,” a Press Release and a Call to the Investigative Committee

The company’s telephone system is not working, said the president of TWU Local 556. The scheduling changes to flight attendants have caused a domino effect across the nation, because they are not manned with enough manpower.

Southwest CEO Bob Jordan told employees in a message obtained by CNN that the company would invest in better systems.

“Part of what we’re suffering is a lack of tools,” Jordan told employees. The need to change the operation is something we’ve talked a lot about.

Later that month, on a call with Wall Street analysts, then-CEO Gary Kelly said the company had made adjustments to prevent a similar meltdown in the future.

“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. “We are aggressively hiring to a goal of approximately 5,000 new employees by the end of this year, and we are currently more than halfway toward that goal.”

The airline said in a statement Monday that it will fly about one-third of its schedule for the next several days as it continues to recover its operations.

Analysts say Southwest’s problems are the result of a confluence of events — not just the severe weather, but staff shortages caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as employees out sick with influenza and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV). The storm was turned into a full-scale catastrophe by an outdated computer system for crew scheduling.

That failure has attracted the attention of Congress. The causes of these disruptions and how they affect customers will be looked at by the Senate committee on commerce, science, and transportation.

The saga began last Thursday when Taylor McClain’s morning flight from Salt Lake City to Chicago Midway was canceled. He rebooked for a 3 p.m. that didn’t end up departing until 9 p.m.

McClain’s return to Utah has been even more harrowing. He was going to be in Chicago late Monday. It was called off. He will only be able to change it for Thursday night.

An Explanation for a Loss from an Airliner Passenger in the Bronx: A Case Study of Southwest Airlines

He is fortunate to be with his parents, but he will burn a lot of vacation time and pay more in kennel fees for the dog he can’t get back to.

Helane Becker, an aviation analyst with the investment bank and financial services company, says that Southwest needs to bring internal software systems up to date.

Becker says that it’s not only their customer-facing systems, but their crew scheduling as well. “Southwest has always been a laggard when it comes to technology.”

Southwest uses a “point-to-point” system that has planes flying from destination to destination and picking up staff along the way. Point-to-point systems have their advantages, as they can offer direct and more affordable flights because the destinations they stop at typically have less air traffic, but flight schedules can quickly fall apart once one route gets canceled.

With Southwest, however, “their pilots take off in the morning from one city, then they fly to two, three, four, five, six other cities. The crew of the flight can change in there and then it can fly across the country for a night or two.

All sorts of pilots and flight attendants can’t get to their destinations due to the weather situation, because quite often they aren’t based at the same city or they don’t live there. “So when there’s bad weather, everything tends to get out of position.”

His wife and their two young children live with him in Denver. A family was in New York City to celebrate with their daughter’s birthday and wedding anniversary.

The family flew out on the 21st, and planned to fly home on Christmas Eve. Before they went to the airport, Lenz checked his phone app to make sure everything was okay.

It wasn’t good. The flight was canceled. He was on the phone for hours, but didn’t reach an agent. He used an app on his phone to rebook. He reached an agent on Monday. He asked, “Do you think this is going to be resolved by the time we fly out?”

The agent reassured him, and even moved the flight to the 27th. “But that’s when everything started to get canceled,” he says — including his Tuesday flight.

The Seattle-Sundrum Car Rental Company: Losing What You Need to Go With Your Travel, and Why You Shouldn’t Go There

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 is for us to take a break at the hotel and then pick it up again so we could be there Thursday night.

Becker says that the company has owned its problems since they have hurt Southwest and its customers. She says that they’re out in front. They’re said to be buying meals for people and putting them in hotel rooms. They’re doing their best to get you where you need to go. They’re paying you back. They’re purchasing tickets on other airlines.

Potter says the airlines’ failures make customers pay the price. And that will continue as long as the carriers are allowed to “keep running these razor thin margins where mass delays and cancellations [are] just a storm or a mechanics strike or an IT software issue away.”

The mass cancellations have travelers at airports waiting in line for two or more hours to rebook their new flights, which, unfortunately, won’t occur anytime soon. A number of passengers report not getting new flights until the end of this week or after the New Year, forcing them to sleep on airport floors while they wait.