![]() ![]() Southwest has to solve the issues that caused the holiday trouble and make amends with customers, but many travelers - particularly those at airports where Southwest has a strong foothold - typically have few airline choices, Ahasic said. Mark Ahasic, an aviation consultant who worked with JetBlue during the 2007 meltdown, said the airline's reputation "took a hit, but it didn't destroy the brand." "As they're going through a disrupted trip they'll say 'never again' - and then they do." "Customers just consistently choose their flights based on fare and schedule," he said. Southwest, United, Delta and American control more than three-quarters of the U.S. Making amendsĮven those travelers burned by an airline in an event like this one face few alternatives when booking airline tickets and are often focused on price and schedule, ICF's Engel said. "The issue here wasn't the network, the issue was how many places got hit with weather and how many cancellations that drove, basically continuously," he said. Jordan defended the model and said the network is usually easier to recover because travelers don't have to rely on connections to get to their destinations. The model generally works and helps keep costs down, but it can compound disruptions during extreme events. "Every airline has its fall, and from that they rise with new perspectives," said Samuel Engel, a senior vice president at consulting firm ICF. "The airline reaches a certain point of complexity and has a disruption event of such scale that it causes them to look deep inside."īoth Spirit and Southwest operate so-called point-to-point networks that don't rely on hubs, like larger airlines, and instead have planes hopscotching around the country. Months earlier, Spirit Airlines took a $50 million hit from mass disruptions. Southwest itself had a smaller-scale cascade of flight disruptions in October 2021 that cost it around $75 million. (He has since started a new carrier in the U.S., called Breeze Airways.) JetBlue 's meltdown in February 2007 cost CEO David Neeleman, JetBlue's founder, his job. Still, scheduling chaos after bad weather isn't new for the airline industry. "The GE Digital tool that is integrated into Southwest's systems performed as designed throughout the event, and we are working with them to define new functionality as they improve their crew rescheduling capability," a GE spokesman said Tuesday. Southwest flew around just a third of its planned schedule for several days after Christmas to get crews and planes where they needed to go. ![]() "That was basically pulling the schedule down." "We needed a larger answer to reset the network," Jordan said. The carrier's aircraft and crews were left out of place and at the mercy of crew scheduling systems that were designed to handle current or future flight disruptions, not a pileup of flight changes in the past. Most airlines had largely recovered from the bad weather by Christmas Day, but Southwest's problems worsened when crews had to call in to get new assignments or hotel rooms, causing a backup. Snow and high winds suspended operations at airports across the country. Hydraulic fluid turned so thick in the brutal cold that jet bridges couldn't move. Airline executives had expected it to be the busiest travel period since the Covid-19 pandemic began. 31, a tally that swelled after it failed to recover from severe winter weather that crippled travel across the country, stabilizing days later. Southwest said it canceled about 16,700 flights between Dec. Both groups have warned about inadequate technology and scheduling for years. Southwest said it offered premium pay to flight attendants and $45 million in "gratitude pay" to pilots because of the meltdown. "We have work to do to repair trust, but our customers are very loyal and we're seeing that loyalty." Less than a year into the airline's top job, in the aftermath of travel chaos he hadn't seen in his more than three decades at Southwest, Jordan is now tasked with making things right with passengers and employees. The Transportation Department is in the early phase of an investigation into the airline's holiday turmoil and is also "probing whether Southwest executives engaged in unrealistic scheduling of flights which under federal law is considered an unfair and deceptive practice," a spokesperson said Wednesday. Lawmakers and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said they want to look further into the disruptions. The event was jarring for many travelers used to Southwest customer service, which includes policies like free checked bags, a rarity for domestic U.S. Personal Loans for 670 Credit Score or Lower Personal Loans for 580 Credit Score or Lower ![]() Best Debt Consolidation Loans for Bad Credit ![]()
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