Southwest Airlines Stopped Flight Scheduling for a Christmas Vacation Passenger in Los Alaminos, Fla., during the July Fourth Holiday Rush

A Southwest passenger who was trying to get from Missouri to Denver said she missed out on spending Christmas with her family because of the delays and flights out of the Kansas City International Airport. Despite her being grounded, her luggage was sent to Denver without her, she wrote on Twitter.

Southwest said in a statement that it hoped there would be no disruptions over the New Year’s weekend.

He said, “Our IT infrastructure is vastly outdated, that’s what went wrong.” The system cannot handle the number of pilots and flight attendants that we have in it.

Watterson explained that Southwest’s crew schedulers worked furiously to put a new schedule together, matching available crew with aircraft that were ready to fly. But the Federal Aviation Administration strictly regulates when flight crews can work, complicating Southwest’s scheduling efforts.

“This is really as bad as it gets for an airline,” Potter said. “We’ve seen this again and again over the course of the last year or so, when airlines really just struggle especially after a storm, but there’s pretty clear skies across the country.”

Long lines of travelers attempting to rebook or make connections were witnessed at Southwest ticket counters at multiple US airports on Tuesday, while huge piles of unclaimed bags continued to grow as passengers struggled to reclaim their luggage in airports including Chicago’s Midway International, Harry Reid in Las Vegas and William P. Hobby Airport in Houston.

“I’m okay with these travel situations and fly on by myself when it’s just me, but when my one-year-old has to suffer through it because of ineptitude and mismanagement, that becomes personal,” Southwest passenger Joshua Caudle, who said he was unsure when they would be able to leave Denver, said on Denver7 News. “I’m never going to do this with that company again.”

Several thousand Delta pilots picketed at major airports this summer, asking for higher pay and more staff security, as passengers were hit with flight cancellation in the July Fourth holiday rush. Delta pilots voted last month to authorize a strike after negotiations for a new contract were paused.

What Will Southwest Airlines Tell Us About the Super-Ways Over the Last Three Weeks? The Case for Houston, Las Vegas and Baltimore/Washington

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.

The most affected airports were some of the same ones slammed the hardest earlier this week: Denver International, Chicago Midway, Harry Reid International in Las Vegas, Dallas Love Field, Nashville International and Baltimore/Washington International.

Southwest Airlines will be able to use just over a third of their scheduled flights in the coming days because they’re able to get into the right positions, according to the Wall Street Journal.

“We had a tough day today. Jordan said in an interview that they would have another hard day tomorrow as they attempt to get out of this.

Carlos spoke with passengers in line at the Southwest ticket counter at the Atlanta airport on Monday.

The calls CNN made to Southwest customer service did not go through, so customers were not able to speak with a representative. Southwest told CNN it has full staff to answer calls.

Scott’s Cheap Flight’s founder suggested trying an international number if you were left in the lurch and your attempts to reach a customer service agent were going nowhere.

“The main hotline for US airlines will be clogged with other passengers getting rebooked. “If you want to get through to an agent quickly, you need to call any of the airline’s international offices,” Scott Keyes said.

“As the storm continued to sweep across the country it continued to impact many of our larger stations and so the cancellations just compiled one after another to 100 to 150 to 1,000,” Jay McVay said in a press conference at Houston’s William P. Hobby Airport on Monday night.

“We don’t have the normal hub the other major airlines do. We fly a point-to-point network that can make it difficult for our crews to find their way around.

According to McVay, the company’s first priority is safety. He stated that they want to make sure that they operate the flights safely and that their flight crews have enough time to do it.

“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.”

McVay told them to take care of themselves, do what they have to do for their family, and keep their receipts. “We will make sure they are taken care of, that is not a question.”

The Meltdown of Southwest Airlines: What Happens When the Company Was Half Its Size, Its Experiered And Its Became Unstable

An announcement made in the terminal prior to the news conference apologized to customers, and said the next available SWA seats are on Saturday, December 31st and later. 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 United States Department of Transportation has warned Southwest Airlines that if it fails to do right by stranded passengers the company will face consequences.

Casey Murray, president of the Southwest Airlines Pilot Association, says the blame for Southwest’s meltdown should be placed on the company’s reliance on tech and procedures from the ’90s, when the company was half its size.

He told CNN they had been having issues for the past 20 months. “We’ve seen these sorts of meltdowns occur on a much more regular basis and it really just has to do with outdated processes and outdated IT.”

“We’re still using, not only IT from the ’90s, but also processes [from] when our airline was a tenth of the size,” he said. “And it’s really just not scaled for an operation that we have today.”

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

Greyhound said on Monday it would be disrupted and canceled many of its scheduled services in the Northeastern part of the country 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.

The Southwest Airlines Cascade of Flight Cancellations: A Video Interview with Van de Ven, CEO and Founder, Gary Jordan, and Michelle Cantwell

“We are still not where we want to be with staffing, and in particular with our flight crews,” then-COO Mike Van de Ven said in a recorded video to employees. CNN shared a transcript of the recording at the time. “We simply need more staffing cushion for the unexpected in this environment and we are bringing new people on board every day,” he said.

Southwest CEO Bob Jordan promised to invest in better system in a message to employees obtained by CNN.

Jordan said that part of what they were suffering was a lack of tools. “We’ve talked an awful lot about modernizing the operation, and the need to do that.”

Gary Kelly told Wall Street analysts that 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. A goal of 5,000 new employees by the end of the year has been set by us, and we are just half way toward that goal.

The airline plans to remain on a reduced flying schedule for a few more days, its CEO says in a statement.

This was a long-term event. Demand for travel began to fall as the spread of the disease strained airlines operations. To save on costs, and to avoid layoffs, airlines including Southwest offered voluntary buyouts, leaves of absence and early retirement packages.

US Senator Maria Cantwell, who chaired the Senate committee hearing last year, issued a statement Tuesday pledging the panel would be looking into the causes behind Southwest Airlines cascade of flight cancellations.

For Southwest passenger Taylor McClain, 34, the saga started last Thursday, when his morning flight from Salt Lake City into 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 scheduled to leave Chicago late Monday. It was canceled. The most recent one that he’s been able to reassign is for Thursday night.

Southwest Airlines Needs to Reinforce Their Internal Software Solutions in the Presence of a Dog or a Fleeing Officer: An Aviation Analyst’s Perspective

He will burn a lot of days of vacation and pay a lot of extra kennel fees because he can’t get his dog back.

Helane Becker, an aviation analyst with Cowen, an investment bank and financial services company, says Southwest needs to bring those tools, in the form of internal software systems, up to date.

“It’s not only their customer-facing systems, it’s their crew scheduling and so on,” Becker says. “Southwest has always been a laggard when it comes to technology.”

Another factor is Southwest’s reliance on shorter, point to point flights, rather than a ” hub and spoke” model of many of its competitors. It’s a system that works well for them in fair weather. But in inclement weather, it can cause problems, says Kathleen Bangs, a former commercial airline pilot and spokesperson for FlightAware.

“What you’re doing with Southwest is, you’re checking a bag from the first city to the second city, and then rechecking it into the third city,” he said. “Whereas with American, Delta or United, you’re checking a bag from the origin city all the way to the destination.”

A Denver, Colorado, resident’s worst nightmare: flight cancellations from Southwest Airlines – a case study of Lenz and his family

As a result, “when you get a weather situation like this, you have all sorts of pilots and flight attendants that can no longer get to where they need to be, because quite often flight crews are not based at the same city or they don’t live at the same city that they’re based out of,” she says. Everything gets out of position when there’s bad weather.

Lenz lives in Denver with his family, which includes two young children. The family was in New York City to celebrate his daughter’s birthday and his wedding anniversary.

The family flew out on the 21st, and planned to fly home on Christmas Eve. Just before they departed for the airport, Lenz checked his phone app “to make sure everything was good.”

It wasn’t good. The flight did not leave on time. He couldn’t get an agent to answer the phone. He used the app on his phone to rebook. He finally reached an agent on Monday. He asked, “Do you think we’ll have this resolved by the time we leave?”

The agent reassured him, and even moved the flight to the 27th. He says his Tuesday flight was canceled at that time.

Source: https://www.npr.org/2022/12/27/1145616523/southwest-airlines-flight-cancellations-2022

The Loss of Flights from Southwest Airlines During the “Great Meltdown”: Trisha Jones and her Family Revisited

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. So our goal is to take a quick breather at the hotel and then pick it up again so we can be there Thursday night,” Lenz says.

Southwest Airlines will have to earn back the trust of the public. Southwest experienced a “true meltdown at the worst possible time” despite the weather, he said in email to CNN Travel.

The analyst says the airlines’ failures mean customers end up paying 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. Some people are unable to get new flights until at least the end of this week or New Year, which means they have to sleep on airport floors.

Buttigieg spoke with Bob Jordan, Southwest’s CEO, on Tuesday about the thousands of flights that have been canceled this week, without an immediate idea of when passengers can rebook.

We will hold them responsible for making sure that this does not happen again, and we will also get them through this situation and make sure that they are held accountable for their responsibilities.

Passenger Trisha Jones told CNN at the airport in Atlanta that she and her partner had been traveling for five days, trying to get home to Wichita, Kansas, after disembarking from a cruise at Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

“We were fortunate, because we were in Fort Lauderdale — my family lives in the Tampa bay area so we were able to rent a car to go see my family for Christmas,” Jones said. “We’ve seen a lot of families who are sleeping on the floor, and it just breaks my heart.”

Reply to Jordan’s “Comment on Southwest Airlines in the Light of the Southwest Airlines Flight cancellations”, J.D. Potter, M.S., L.M. Freed, F.A. Jordan, J.

Customers who want to get a reimbursement for meals, hotels, and alternate transportation have a page at Southwest.com that they can use.

The DOT has warned Southwest that it will face consequences if it doesn’t make right by stranded passengers.

All of the aviation system is moving in the right direction, but this airline has been moving in the wrong direction.

While Jordan acknowledged problems with the company response, the statement suggested that he did not foresee massive changes to Southwest’s procedures in response to the mass cancellations.

“Clearly, we need to double down on our already existing plans to upgrade systems for these extreme circumstances so that we never again face what’s happening right now.”

“Every airline in the country is jam-packed right now, so your odds of even finding a seat — let alone at an even halfway decent price — get smaller by the hour,” Potter said.

“Travelers in the thick of this should be sure to save all their receipts: other flights, a rental car, nights at the hotel, meals, anything,” Potter said.

The price caps vary by location in areas affected by cancellations, an American Airlines spokesperson told CNN. Southwest did not respond to CNN’s request for comment.

One passenger posted a picture of a flight from San Diego to Orlando with American, Delta, and United fares that were over $2,000. The passenger was trying to get a seat on the canceled Southwest flight.

In order to make sure people can get to their destinations quickly and safely during the holiday season, Freed said they have capped fares in some cities to make sure that flights are available to everyone.

Southwest will honor “reasonable requests” for alternate transportation, but it does not rebook passengers on competitors flights, unlike legacy carriers.

Southwest Airlines Paid for the 21st Century Transportation Coronavirus Pandemic: The Impact of the Payroll Protection and Payroll Support Programs

When the coronavirus pandemic ground the transportation industry to a screeching halt in early 2020, the US government doled out more than $54 billion in aid to help pay employees and keep the systems from buckling.

Southwest intends to pay a $438 million dividend next year in order to do right by consumers, they wrote. Southwest should be focused on the customers stuck on hold at airports.

[The pandemic aid] “is water under the bridge at this point,” said Robert Mann, a Port Washington, New York-based airline industry analyst. “The only distinguishing factors at this point are to what degree carriers have satisfied obligations that permit them to either return to paying dividends or return to paying higher officer salaries.”

When air travel plunged in early 2020, the government stepped in with financial assistance to keep the airlines running. Preventing layoffs and furloughs in the transportation sector was a critical focal point as employees such as pilots are subject to training requirements and other certifications that, if lagged, could significantly disrupt air travel for a considerable time.

The Payroll Protection Program was meant to help smaller businesses keep employees paid during the Pandemic and the Payroll Support Program was similar in nature.

The federal aid to airlines, which was a mix of grants and loans, came with some caveats: The airlines had to use the funds exclusively to continue paying wages, salaries and benefits to employees; and, for specific periods of time, they couldn’t conduct furloughs or layoffs; issue dividends or stock buybacks; or increase pay for executives.

Gary Kelly, the former chief executive officer of Southwest Airlines, spoke at a Senate Committee on Commerce Science and Transportation hearing in December of 2021 about the impact of the PSP.

“Funds received through each round of the PSP were only used for qualifying employee salaries, wages, and benefits,” he added. “We did not cut pay rates; we did not cut hours; we did not cut benefits; we did not layoff; we did not furlough. We actually raised our minimum pay to $15 per hour, effective August 1, 2021.”

Southwest Airlines during the Pandemic Aid Meltdown: What Upgrades Should Airlines Take? A Commentary on the House-Debated Treasury Investigation

Southwest had a good footing in the future thanks to its fiscally conservative approach and cost-cutting throughout the pandemic, as noted by Kelly.

Two House Democrats requested the inspector general of the Treasury Department to look into whether funds from the Public Service Funds were used to help Southwest Airlines deal with staffing shortages and service disruptions.

Pre-Pandemic flying levels were used to determine the amounts based on the carriers salary levels. According to the US Government Accountability Office, passenger traffic on airline flights plummeted by 100% in April of 2020.

Mann said that no carrier was operating in 2019. “In fact, while saying ‘no layoffs,’ numerous carriers cut hours and related pay. Many others initiated voluntary separation agreements that paid fewer hours and salary dollars over a defined future period in exchange for early retirements or similar.”

“Could have been as simple as fuel, interest payments, other overheads,” he said. The idea that a carrier sees no need for upgraded IT is not realistic.

“Now that the problem has occurred, and at [the Department of Transportation] and the market’s urging, I suspect the carrier has a different view of what IT upgrades are necessary,” he said. “They’ll spend their own money now to research, develop and implement new systems.”

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/28/business/southwest-pandemic-aid-meltdown/index.html

Reply to Markey and Blumenthal’s “Cautionary Letter” Concerning Southwest Airlines’ Nonrepayability for Holiday Cancellations

Democratic Sens. Ed Markey of Massachusetts and Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut issued a new letter Tuesday calling on Southwest to pay up for what they say were avoidable holiday cancellations.

According to an airline customer service dashboard created by the Department of transportation, nine of the major airlines that operate in the United States can offer complimentary hotel accommodations for any passenger affected by an overnight cancellation or delay. Frontier Airlines does not.

Unlike in other countries, the United States has no federal laws that require airlines to compensate passengers for flight delays, according to the Department of Transportation. Passengers can get a refund for the flight if it is canceled and add on costs, like bag fees or seat assignments, according to the Department of Transportation.

Cancellation policies differ among airlines and can depend on a number of factors. Airlines will give refunds as travel credit, which can be used in the future.

“Requests for reasonable reimbursements directly related to the travel disruption will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis to support the customer, including meals, hotels and alternate transportation,” Mr. Perry said. It was not known how long it would take for those reimbursements to be processed.

“After trying to operate as much of our full schedule as we could, we reached a decision point to reduce our flying to catch up,” he said.

Flying with the Wind: An Empirical Analysis of Explanation and Recommendation to the Southwest Airlines Transportation System (WFTA/Secondaries)

In an interview with PBS Newshour, Buttigieg described such practices as “unacceptable” and threatened to hold the airline to its own stated intentions.

They will be expected to pay for ground travel expenses, meals and refunds, as well as going beyond the letter of the law regarding how they treat passengers.

Employees were able to use their own devices. They did it. He told Morning Edition that they weren’t given the tools to do their jobs and they weren’t given the leadership to answer questions.

The airline industry does not like regulations because they make the cost burden on the customer worse. Southwest is better suited for deciding what needs to change than the DOT is, agrees Murray.

Congress is looking at whether the airline will compensate customers. The chair of the Senate Commerce Committee said it would launch an investigation.

Southwest says that all customers traveling through Jan. 2, 2023 have the option to rebook or travel standby without fees. But for those looking to get a cash payment, the company has opened a special self-service portal for processing.

The Murphys: Getting Their Flights Out Of The Airport Without A Billion$for’s G., R. Murphy, and R. J. McGee

“I’ve never seen a meltdown of this size, it’s the worst I think we’ve ever seen,” said William J. McGee, a senior fellow for Aviation and Travel at the American Economic Liberties Project.

“We are encouraged by the progress we’ve made to realign crew, their schedules and our fleet,” it said. “We know even our deepest apologies — to our customers, to our employees, and to all affected through this disruption — only go so far,” the statement read.

The Murphys were going to fly from Nashville to Denver on Christmas Day. While at the airport, the pair watched Southwest continue to delay their flight before eventually cancelling it altogether. Now, they’re waiting to get on another flight.

Their luggage made it to Denver, even without them. Murphy’s father-in-law, who lives in Denver, was able to drive to the airport and find two of their suitcases. Murphy’s medication and Christmas gifts are still in the pile.

And while Murphy waits to be reunited with her suitcase, she continues to rack up hundreds of dollars in costs, transporting herself to and from the airport and replacing some of her belongings.

The Point-to-Point System: Disruption After Buckley’s Flight Plane and Cancellation, Airline Effort

The point-to-point system, which allows planes to go from one small airport to another, used to be the norm for airlines. Most major airlines follow a hub-and-spoke system, which means they connect routes to a major hub.

The model will shift the power to consumers back to them after a summer of flight delays and canceled flights, according to the press release.

After Brittney Buckley’s flight from Denver to Chicago, where her family lives, got canceled, she was able to rebook another flight that got her there days before Christmas.

Air tags on her luggage showed that they were still in Denver despite the airline telling her that her bags would be in Chicago. She suspects that they’re somewhere buried under the mountains of bags that now litter the airport’s baggage claim.

She said that she was one of millions of people waiting in a machine to get an answer. “And I know we don’t have that much power. I’m going to wait until a few days have passed to get an update on my luggage. I have written it off.

The situation became more dire this week because other major airlines have recovered from the cold and snow that hit the United States over the holiday weekend.

We know our deepest apologies to customers, employees, and all affected by the disruption will only go so far, the statement read.

Cancellation Rates of Airline Airlines During the Covid-19 Pandemic, and Forecasting for 2022, Revisited: CNN Observations

Cancellation rates among airlines fluctuate year-to-year, depending on weather and other factors, such as Covid-19, which resulted in a major industry-wide disruption in the early months of the pandemic in 2020.

The data for 2022 has only been released by the bureau. CNN analyzed carrier data from January to September in the past.

If you’re flying from a small market to a hub, you have to change planes. But that model has the operational advantage of quickly flying crews and planes out of the hub to where they’re needed.

Southwest was left with an incredibly delicate house of cards because of manual scheduling.

Watterson said that they would make great progress, and then there would be some disruption, which would ruin their work. We had to reset the problem because we were close to finishing it.

Resilient Airlines: Restoring Customer Relations after the Southwest Airlines System Goes Beyond Its Expected, Says Michael Quidort

“I had to rebook on United,” said Michael Quidort, 32, who was traveling home from Raleigh, N.C., to Chicago when his Southwest flight was canceled. He said he paid United $295, but his original flight was $140, and when he tried to submit a claim, the Southwest system kept crashing. He plans to keep trying, but said he is “not that hopeful” that he’ll get reimbursed. “Everything has just been a mess with them and I don’t have a lot of faith in them turning this around any time soon,” he said.

A Southwest executive said in a Thursday morning message to customers that the airline is making “a pledge to do everything we can and to work day and night to repair our relationship with you.”

The progress we have made to realign crew, their schedules, and our fleet is encouraged by it. We are eager to get back to a state of normality, with another holiday weekend full of important connections.

Ryan Green is the chief commercial officer of the airline, and he wants to rebuild customer relations that sunk to rock bottom after the collapse of services.

The first step in making things right is a personal apology from Green, who said his experiences fell short of expectations.

His remarks, which follow earlier apologies from airline CEO Jordan, came as Buttigieg made his own scathing assessment Southwest’s troubles, calling the situation a complete “meltdown.”

Hister said that if there is not long lines at the airport, then it speaks to the improvements that they are trying to make. So, maybe you know, the efforts to redeem themselves are working.”

As extreme winter conditions swept much of the country last week — including important airports in Southwest’s network — Southwest’s plan for “irregular operations” passed the breaking point, according to multiple people familiar with the situation.

The airline said that its internal process requires multiple departments to manually redesign the schedule and it works “the majority of the time.”

Southwest software leaves much of the rebuilding of the network to be done manually when something goes wrong.

“It can’t see the best way to fix anything when flights are canceled,” said Brian Brown, president of Transport Workers Union Local 550, representing Southwest dispatchers and meteorologists. It requires more human intervention and can only handle so much.

The result is that airline officials “don’t necessarily know where our crews are, where our planes are,” Brown said. Crew schedulers manually check to see if pilots and flight attendants meet strict federal rules on work hours to make sure they aren’t tired.

Elaine Chao, who served as secretary of transportation during the Trump administration, described the Southwest Airlines breakdown as “a failure of unbelievable proportions.”

“Their system really has completely melted down,” Buttigieg told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer. We will hold them accountable for their responsibilities to customers in order to get them through this situation and to make sure they don’t happen again.

The ‘Meltdown’ That Could: Katie Demeko, a St. Louis bride, and a Los Alamos Traveler

Among those affected was bride-to-be Katie Demeko from St. Louis, who had to postpone her wedding after her Southwest flight to Belize was canceled at the last minute.

“We went to the the airport, our flight was on time, and when we were getting ready to board, the captain came out, gave a speech and basically told us the flight was canceled,” she told CNN.

“Southwest says, ‘We will honor reasonable requests for reimbursement for meals, hotel and alternate transportation,’” he said. “While Southwest is being vague on how much they will reimburse, I would avoid any expensive hotels or restaurants. Use Google Hotels to find nearby hotels near the airport where you are stranded.”

You should check out some free things to do near you when you conduct a few Google searches. I don’t believe Southwest will pay for tours or other activities, so I wouldn’t book any expensive excursions for you.

But it was a breakdown of the airline’s old computer system used for crew scheduling that has turned otherwise challenging weather-fueled disruptions into what experts have called an “unprecedented” airline meltdown.

The family had packed winter coats and warm clothes for when it was minus 3 degrees in Denver, but they only had warm clothes to wear on the morning of their trip to California. When they finally got back home to Memphis and stood in line with dozens of others to check on their luggage, it turned out their bags had been in Denver the whole time.

Given all the chaos she’s witnessed this week, Proveaux figured she’d never see her bags again. But on Wednesday night, to her shock, the luggage was delivered to her door.

An apology to Southwest Airlines for a failure of its Internet Scheduling software, which has caused millions of dollars in inconvenience for Southwest employees and passengers, according to an employee

Southwest apologized late Wednesday and again on Thursday and said passengers could apply online for baggage returns, flight refunds and travel expenses.

The impact that outdated scheduling software has on passengers and employees has been criticized by the company.

She says she had to pull him off the plane when he was trying to go home to see his family, because he was at the airport.

The president of the Transport Workers Union said in a statement that many Southwest employees had to work 16 or 18-hour shifts during the holidays, and were getting sick.

One of the most powerful things about social media is that it can take you right into the heart of a situation: A Lizzo concert, a political rally, a Florida emu farm, a picnic where a young man expresses his devotion to corn…

Hillary Chang is a fan of Southwest Airlines. Chang is a loyal Southwest customer who travels frequently with her boyfriend. “I have a Southwest credit card. We only fly Southwest.

What’s in the TikTok? How Southwest is going to deliver on its promises? Hillary Chang’s frustrations and her regrets

They hurried to the baggage claim, where the TikTok scene was spread out in front of them. What Chang didn’t mention was that her boyfriend had recently proposed and (while the ring itself was on her finger) She was going to save the ring box as a souvenir.

“This is what the Houston airport looks like,” she says in the TikTok, panning over hundreds of unclaimed suitcases. It’s enough to make any frequent flyer’s blood boil.

Social media exaggerates the black eye for Southwest. All week, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and TikTok have been full of images and videos of people’s harrowing travel experiences, making the scope of the fail far more visceral.

Posts like these have millions of views and comments such as “Don’t fly @SouthwestAir folks” and “Southwest is going to get destroyed over this and rightfully so.”

“They’ve got the best reputation for customer service and management agility,” he says. “They’re usually pretty good at responding to crises and I’m really surprised by all this.”

Stuck in Houston, looking at the expanse of rollerboards and a giant line of frustrated travelers, Chang and her fiancé realized they would need to fend for themselves.

They drove back to LA in a rented car. Chang posted a short TikTok of the road trip, which involved driving through the night in order to be back to work on the morning of Dec. 27. The TikTok did yield some fruit — one of Chang’s friends sent her $50 for gas, wishing the couple well on their long drive.

“I have tens of thousands of miles with them, that’s why my bag is lost here in the Southwest,” said Hillary Chang. Now, she says, “I’ve been thinking about it … I’m willing to date another airline.

The big question on everyone’s mind: Can Southwest now deliver? The picture will get a lot clearer when air traffic picks up on Friday.

If those planes are back up in the air and there are less luggage, that would be a relief for passengers. It’s got a mark on its back.

Top US government officials are disconcerted, to say the very least, about how Southwest got to this point in the aftermath of a massive winter storm that every other major US airline had under control days ago.

The airline will be used by Williams in the future. “I like Southwest. I mean, the bags are free,” Williams said.

Mr. Mann believed it would be a case-by-case basis. Booking an expensive flight might indicate to the airline you had a serious obligation you couldn’t miss, he said. He advised to keep your receipts, use the Southwest tool, and see how it goes.

Ms. Nastro also wondered whether passengers who incurred nonrefundable expenses — including for Airbnbs and all-inclusive hotels — would be covered under Southwest’s vague reimbursement policy. She said there were a lot of cases like this.

The Staggered Flight Attendant-Flight Meltdown: Two Pilots vs. One Flying at a Fleeing Airport

Families with young children stranded at the airport for Christmas. Flight attendants and pilots are sleeping. Vast piles of luggage — some with presents inside, some with medication — stuck in the wrong airport. Travelers were stuck on hold for hours.

The president of the union representing Southwest pilots called the Christmas meltdown “catastrophic” but told NPR he, for one, wasn’t surprised by it — and neither were most pilots.

There is no reimbursement for missing Christmas or spending a night on the floor of an airport with a cranky toddler.