i would imagine that's especially vulnerable to disruption as any delay/issue is magnified throughout the rest of the flights.
It must really help all the employees with routine and consistency even if it’s not optimal.
The planes are scheduled that way, but the people won't stay for the entire plane's cycle.
That said, I flew Southwest from SJC to LAS for CES one year, connecting in SAN. Weather wasn't great, and they'd put you on the next available flight with an empty seat. They were even able to shuffle people without going up to the podium. Legacy carriers would have drug their feet, there'd be a line, and they'd charge for the privilege of changing flights.
Maybe not 1:1 for what you're describing, but it solution/reason, but does seem like a possible sign that they're investing in proactive tools.
Delta does this well too. Haven’t heard many good things about American.
If I’ve had a missed connection en route, I’ll generally land and the app tells me what they’ve already rebooked me onto, but I have a choice of many different alternatives (usually) and can pick among them without cost and without waiting in a call queue.
Stuck on the tarmac in the snow and miss the connecting flight (last of the day)? They automatically rebooked me on another airline and I got a notification from the app as soon as I had reception.
3+ SFO bound flights delayed at JFK because of crazy winds at SFO? They proactively encouraged people to rebook, gratis. I rebooked on a flight the next day on nicer equipment, through the app, went into town, grabbed some bagels and had a flight at a nearly ideal time of day.
Regional plane goes tech? They had a red coat out and about keeping everyone informed.
Missed a flight because I misread the departure time? They sold me a same day ticket on the next flight at a hefty discount and I kept the inbound leg.
Southwest has a huge disadvantage and it's not tech: it's the lack of interline agreements. Nearly every other airline (except perhaps Spirit) can rebook you on another carrier when things go sideways. Southwest simply can't. With an interline agreement in place you'd have far fewer people getting stuck with exorbitant last minute fares.
In general though don't fly when you're getting unusual weather. Less than an inch of snow at PDX throws everything into chaos (and Portlanders call it fucking snowpocalypse). A few inches of snow at PWM and they don't even blink.
I should also add that a few years back when my Southwest flight out of SFO got cancelled I was able to book a seat on a flight out of OAK with a minimum of effort. I think I had to pay the difference in fare though. When it works, it works, but the go it alone attitude will only take you so far.
AA live chat said they couldn’t help (other than rebooking 2 days later which would be pointless) but when I called they were able to drop the connection inbound and outbound so I could drive to the hub city airport (cost me like 2 hours each way, nbd).
They fixed it in like 3 minutes on the phone but it seems like they have to do it in a super hacky way because I had to check in at the airport which was no fun with long holiday lines.
So, when a flight is delayed for a repair (maintenance delay) does that equal "not enough aircraft"?
Carriers can't staff surplus crews any more than they can sit on spare aircraft, which are small, very carefully computed quantities.
It is a crew rest delay.
It was super convenient even if I was fuming over the multiple hours delay.
I'd look at it the other way around: cancelling is so annoying for them that they're often the last ones to do it (barring catastrophic collapse, of course).
When I was traveling weekly out of Chicago, I always made sure to bring my Southwest credit card, just in case. Southwest sucks, but it gets you home.
My sister was recently stranded in DFW trying to make it to SFO when American Airlines canceled her flight. They were happy to substitute another flight... to Sacramento.
So the two-hour round trip to pick her up from SFO turned into an eight-hour round trip to Sacramento. I'm amazed this was considered an acceptable substitute. Would have been nice if American was willing to get you home in the event of canceled flights.
(We could see available seats on flights from DFW to SFO at that time from Delta and Alaska. But those seats were "not available to American rebooking agents". It seems like that should have been American's problem, not ours.)
Footnote: even though my sister had to be rebooked onto the American flight to Sacramento, American didn't bother rerouting her luggage, which they sent to SFO. I guess canceling the flight meant "the plane will still fly, but without passengers".
I realize that this was inconvenient and a big hassle, so I don't want to make light of it, but something seems off with the geography.
- You need to allow for a wider margin of error in predicting travel times, which means leaving earlier than strictly necessary. But leaving early doesn't mean getting back early; you have to wait for the plane to debark.
- This trip was long enough to be more demanding than an electric car could handle, requiring 30 minutes of time spent parked and charging the car.
- More time was wasted waiting for the luggage to show up; we were not informed that it hadn't been sent.
The Box ( https://www.amazon.com/Box-Shipping-Container-Smaller-Econom... ) has some interesting things to say about this.
In that book, the ordinary logistical setup is that ships tend to cover individual transit routes, which means that a delay affecting one ship doesn't spread through the system. Malcom McLean tries to set up a system of ships that always sail east instead, and it fails very badly, because delays on each individual leg of the (infinitely long!) route accumulate instead of happening and then fading away.
I see lots of people who are at least quite a bit less likely to use them in the future (and they are still in the middle of trying to fix it).
Meh, everybody always says that. In six months when this is a distant memory… it will be business as usual.
For me (I am affected), this is actually another in a series of recent events that are making me reconsider my preference for SWA. They are no longer a "cheap" airline, routinely more expensive than the other major carriers. Their planes are not nice anymore. I've flown on a few other airlines over the past few years and found their planes to be nicer with more features (like chargers and phone/tablet holders). And now this. The cancellations are one thing, but they totally botched the communication of it, and their practice of delaying flights throughout the day only to cancel half of them after several hours left people stranded.
Will I stop using them? We'll see how they respond, but they may not be my first choice anymore.
https://blog.autoslash.com/secrets-to-getting-a-cheap-deal-o...
I just laugh at the upset attempts when you go to check in online: “get priority boarding and 2 inches of legroom for only an extra 50% on top of the ticket price.” I really don’t see much evidence that there was actually a race to the bottom. And I certainly won’t blame consumer preferences when I don’t see any options for slightly better service for slightly more money.
Boston to Las Vegas, Orlando, or San Francisco, I’ve got a wide variety of choices, 2-4 carriers flying more than that non-stops per day.
Flying from Des Moines to Presque Isle, Maine, I have only a bunch of 2 and 3 stops on United.
BOS has the "advantage" of serving a fairly large population while also not being big enough to be a real hub for anyone[0], while being simultaneously big enough to have service from nearly everyone.
Unlike a lot of airports smaller or serving fewer people than BOS (and some of comparable size), you can get from BOS to a whole mess of hubs.
A few select routes (BOS to SFO as noted) are incredibly well-served because of the volume of lucrative business travel between the two and the fact that a whole mess of airlines already serve both airports.
[0] No, JetBlue doesn't count. Boston is as much a hub for them as CLE[1] was for Continental. I.e. a second class hub at best.
[1] CLE by comparison only really serves Cleveland. Columbus, Dayton, Cinci, Indy, Pittsburgh and probably a few others from a similar radius BOS draws from all have decent(ish) airports. All of those have basically the same problem as CLE or are worse in some way. I've flown through or into and out of all of them.
But for the 329,925,000 other Americans, many of whom have a long history and belief in Southwest’s reputation for customer service and fair policies? They will have forgotten by next week.
Is Southwest the lone primary carrier for many of their airports?
SWA is generally one of the bigger users of any particular airport they use as SWA tends to avoid the "primary tier" hub airports.
SWA examples: Providence or Nashua, not Boston. Houston Hobby--not Intergalactic. Chicago Midway not O'Hare. San Jose rather than San Francisco. etc.
https://www.southwest.com/help/changes-and-cancellations/ove...
The effect is the same either way. Someone paid for a ticket and they don't get to board the plane.
The airline sold you something that they can't deliver because they refuse to keep extra planes around. They refuse to keep extra planes around because that would eat into profits, and would mean their execs wouldn't be able to buy their third gold-plated yachts.
Another way to think of it is what could an airline have reasonably done to avoid the situation? If it's overbooking, the reasonable thing is to not overbook. If it's overselling, they could choose not to fully book their scheduled equipment, but is that reasonable? They can't choose to have 100% reliable planes and crews and weather and ground operations. Stuff happens, and it's certainly reasonable to be upset when it does, but understanding why it happened can be helpful, so making a distinction between overbooking and overselling makes sense to me.
Seatguru says [1] southwest flies three variants, 737-700 with 143 seats and 737-800 and 737-Max 8 both with 175 seats.
If a -700 gets substituted in, that's a lot of missing seats. I've also flown on planes where one seat is out of service for whatever reason and usually has a plastic cover on it.
[1] https://seatguru.com/airlines/Southwest_Airlines/information...
> They're legally protected when doing this, and it's why that
> doctor got dragged off that flight.
This is definitely their fault, but nothing like United pulling the doctor off the plane
The bottom line here is that the hub-and-spoke model is more resilient than the point-to-point model.
It’s the only thing that explains why Southwest was uniquely impacted this week. Every other airline has staff issues, and the same weather to deal with.
With a point to point network, the coordination problem is much larger than with a hub and spoke network. That is probably what pushed Southwest’s software over the limit. But remember, the software didn’t fail by itself in a vacuum. Resiliency problems during a weather event were the root cause.
..And the one thing that might have saved Southwest in the past, its ferocious employee loyalty and willingness to go several extra miles when the shit hit the fan because they knew they were being taken care of, has been utterly destroyed by the new management.
People were loyal to Herb (not SWA) because Herb was loyal to them. Herb’s gone, loyalty’s gone.
It was a pain so much I stopped flying them. I’d buy a ticket and have to babysit it so that a flight from noon to 6pm didn’t morph over several changes into a multi stop marathon from 8am to 9pm…..
SWA can do this bc they operate a single aircraft type (737), have lower opex (they operate closer to spirit than delta internally and they do things like not allowing full GDS access to force leisure travelers to book through their website), and they keep their aircraft around a while. they also have a smaller network than the bigger airlines do, which further lowers opex.
However, SWA isn't truly point to point seeing as how a lot of their traffic flows through Chicago (MDW), Dallas (DAL) and Houston (HOU) and they have huge hangars and service ops out of these locations.
hubs aren't immune to huge cancellation numbers like this. American and United were heavily impacted during the 2021 Winter storm. Had the storm happened during the busiest peak travel season of the year like it did this year, they would have had record cancellations as well.
They jump around the country, much less frequently going back to a hub as other airlines do. That means that the planes and crews have a relatively harder time recovering from system-wide disasters because they don't have as part of normal operations as much ability to centralize or pool resources and get people/planes reorganized. (everyone go back to base, consolidate passengers, crew, planes and redeploy them and sort things out in one place)
Unfortunate, but that's their model. Good for some purposes, not so good for others.