TProphet1/ A lot of people have been asking for an explainer on what is going on with Southwest Airlines and the massive meltdown that occurred. Hi, I'm TProphet. I write the Seat 31B travel blog (https://www.seat31b.com) and closely follow the airline industry. More importantly, I have a friend whom Southwest abandoned in Las Vegas until New Year's (along with his cat), and there was literally nothing I could do for him. Ready? Let's dive in.
2/ Southwest is the largest domestic carrier in the US. They fly to 23 of the top 25 airports. When it suits them they say "we're a small carrier serving small places, the rules shouldn't really apply to us" (whether it's safety or anything else) but the reality is that they're a major airline. They should be considered as such, and treated accordingly.
3/ Southwest is highly unusual. Their IT is almost entirely homegrown, with software they built themselves. It's creaky and antiquated - you'll observe this if you watch their schedules. They're irregularly and manually loaded into the system.
The majority of airlines use standardized reservations systems like Sabre, Amadeus, etc. which integrate well with other standardized tools. Not Southwest, who only supports limited integrations in specific circumstances.
4/ Other airlines (apart from Southwest, Spirit, Frontier and a couple others like Avelo and Breeze) have relationships with airport hotels so they can issue vouchers to stranded passengers and crew. They also work with each other in a system called "interlining" where they take each other's passengers to avoid total systemic meltdowns like these. For example, when Delta melted down in the past, American and United have bailed them out (and vice-versa).
5/ In this case, it's the week between Christmas and New Year, and there are no seats on other airlines to book their passengers into. Even if there were, there is no interline agreement. So Southwest basically says "see you next week" and dumps you wherever they left you.
6/ So, about aircraft positioning and crew scheduling - Southwest is essentially a short and medium haul airline. They mostly don't do long haul services except for Hawaii.
Southwest turns aircraft quickly, in less than 30 minutes. They have higher aircraft utilization than any other major US airline. They often run their crews on tight loops where they're out from home and back the same day so they can save money on accommodating crews who overnight away from their home base.
7/ Yeah, about that. So when Southwest melted down, they didn't have nearly the number of rooms reserved that they needed for their own crew, and it was Christmas so hotels were full. Crews often did not get rooms. They just got dumped like passengers at airports. At least there are crew break rooms at most airports, but it's not very comfortable.
Major airlines usually have enough hotel relationships to be able to work something out (American has had some issues too) but Southwest does not.
8/ Southwest now has a problem where they need to figure out where all their crews are, and their planes are, and basically redo their entire crew and aircraft scheduling plan for the whole airline. The only real way they have to do this, because of the way they operate, is to stop for an entire day and set to work inventorying their assets and crews and then build out entirely new trips for everyone.
9/ However, they were just really mean to everyone who works for them. They also effectively required employees to come to work sick, making others sick just before they're most needed to recover the operation. Ben Schlappig wrote an article that covers the details here, so check it out: https://onemileatatime.com/news/southwest-airlines-meltdown-denver/
10/ Anyway, how does Southwest fix this? Just like in #infosec, every time there is a high profile problem, there is a vendor promising to magically fix everything with AI. Unfortunately, just like in #infosec, the problem space is very complicated and AI is not good at solving most of these problems.
11/ One way they could handle it is already proven, it's just expensive: holding crews and aircraft in reserve to recover from irregular operations. Qantas successfully does this.
A week ago, Qantas had an A380 unexpectedly land in Azerbaijan.
They thought there might be a fire in the cargo bay so they landed in Baku. It turned out there was a real problem with the aircraft and it couldn't be promptly repaired in Azerbaijan, a country which doesn't frequently see A380s. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/dec/24/qantas-sends-rescue-flight-to-azerbaijan-after-stranded-passengers-left-in-the-dark
12/ Because Qantas plans ahead for emergencies, and they absorb the expense of doing so, they're able to recover their operation. And to be fair, it's not just Southwest who does their route planning this way. You see the same sort of problems with Flair Airlines in Canada. They're an extreme example but fairly representative. Flair serves 34 destinations with 24 aircraft. You can imagine the follow-on impact if any flight, on any leg, has a problem.
13/ This holiday season could have worked out really well for Southwest. They did their route planning the same way that American companies do supply chain planning: "just in time" with no slack or contingency planning. If it all melts down, they dump the problem on their customers. Southwest, after all, legally has no responsibility to anyone except for their shareholders. They are covered by their Contract of Carriage and US Department of Transportation rules (which are lasseiz-faire at best).
14/ You didn't get home for Christmas? You got stranded in Las Vegas for a week? Well, dear consumer, Southwest won't help you, the government won't help you, nobody will compensate you for the losses you suffer, and you also can't sue because the federal government has given airlines a liability shield along with endless taxpayer bailouts. If you don't like it, you're looking at one middle finger from the federal government, and another from Southwest.
15/ One last piece of airline trivia before I leave you all to digest this thread. American Airlines cancelled less than 1% of its schedule yesterday. Southwest cancelled over 70% of its schedule.
Southwest will likely (successfully) claim that under the Contract of Carriage, they do not have to pay for stranded passengers' hotels. Keep this in mind any time that politicians show up saying that every problem will be fixed with tort reform to keep evil class action lawyers from driving up costs.
indriSouthwest has already admitted that the cancellations in the last days were controllable. Given that they updated their customer service plan a few months ago to include hotel vouchers passengers might get more money than they'd have a year ago in the same situation.
Pete Buttigieg Discusses Holiday Travel Chaos
@indri The customer service is a statement of intent, but actions speak louder than words and so far, they're apparently not giving hotel vouchers.
Given the amount of mess there are in and the huge number of passengers affected I'd guess it will take some time to get the compensations out. They'll probably have to build some new process to handle that efficiently and getting people unstuck should have priority.
@indri If I have to guess, the process will be to send a bunch of insurance company letters. You know, the ones that are really nice, talk in circles, and say they're "unable" to pay. Maybe include a $200 expiring airline voucher along with it (that's usually what Southwest does).
Being Southwest, though, they will capitalize things that ordinarily shouldn't be capitalized throughout the letter, in order to sound more like Hunter S. Thompson.
It remains to be seen, but it will probably depend on how often the CEO wants to receive calls not just by DOT staff but by a really pissed Transportation Secretary.