Then next earnings release - when they post shareholders profits - that’s exactly how much they were willing to hold back to fix this, trading profit for people stuck for days.
Accrue a few billion for refunds, depreciate your software to zero, and start to set aside a few billion for new cloud whatever.
Basically, take this as a huge loss and communicate that you’ve lost a lot of goodwill and trying to make passengers whole is #1 priority (after safety, of course).
https://www.forbes.com/sites/advisor/2020/07/15/how-airlines...
And loyalty programs are bigger business for the higher end airlines that cater to business travels and the more affluent.
On top of that, the top 3 airlines make a lot of money off a first class and business travelers who are using other people’s money.
If they have operating income of eight to ten billion a year, spending a third of a billion to upgrade systems seems like it would have been a reasonable investment instead of buying back shares and increasing the dividend.
The resumption itself.
> Not sure why the phone lines "jam up" exactly, don't you have a hierarchical management structure for this sort of thing? Or do 1000 pilots all report to one person?
It's not a problem of management (well it is a problem of 15 years of management fuckup which is the root cause), it's a problem of the scheduling system needing manual updates when things didn't go to plan.
At this point it's completely screwed, so it needs to be completely reset, as in the entire scheduling system needs to be reconfigured from empty, more or less.
And because SouthWest operates entirely on point to point, the same cascading properties which led to its complete collapse mean it needs to restart in a somewhat synchronised manner, otherwise you fly 3 planes, there's no followup, and you're hosed again.
> They've got like 1000 planes and like 100-150 destinations, it's not the traveling sales man problem, an optimal plan isn't needed now so much as a functional one.
The system completely lost track of crews, so all of them need to be relocated, their work cycles reworked, flight slots need to be reallocated, flights need to be re-encoded.