Now I'm irritated. My niece's flight to see us got canceled. It was her Christmas present. Yeah, **** this mickey-mouse company. I'd like to see some executive heads roll without a golden parachute. Take care of your people and your ****. If your reputation is golden, you can charge more. People will pay for quality. Serious question: what is the best domestic airline now?
CNN has updated the story. Don't worry, Pete has vowed to hold them accountable . . . so we got that going for us, which is nice As Southwest flight cancellations continue, Buttigieg vows to hold airline accountable https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/southwest-flight-cancellations-wednesday/index.html
“From what I can tell, Southwest is unable to locate even where their own crews are, let alone their own passengers, let alone baggage,” said Buttigieg, adding that he also spoke with leaders of the airline’s unions representing flight attendants and pilots. I read somewhere where their idea was to get all pilots located in a central location, get their pilot info, get that info back to HQ, assign them to a plane. Bwahahaha - seriously - THAT'S your plan? You don't have their number and just call them and say "Hey where the heck are you?" They have a full on cat rodeo going on right now. I've really lost a lot of respect for LUV. Building a new system that integrates with all their legacy systems will take a year or more IF you have the right people AND the right software.
I think it depends on where you're located. For my location it's Delta. I'm 2 hours from their hub in ATL.
I almost exclusively fly United for work, it's possible they are the best, they are often fairly competent, but that's a harsh indictment of their competition if true. If "often fairly competent" is somehow the gold standard in the industry, it's a very bad sign all around.
Since we are in Houston, next best is UAL for non-stop but Delta if you don't mind connecting in ATL, SLC, LAX etc.
I fly Delta as much as possible. It's usually to my company's HQ in Wisconsin, so I can fly direct to MSP or DET from IAH and catch a puddle jumper from there into central WI. Other choice is United through O'Hare but the amount of times I've been screwed by that connection make it a lot less attractive option. I'm supposed to fly Southwest in 2 weeks...burning off the rest of my points with them to take the family to Disneytown. Now I'm concerned they won't have their s*** together in time and wondering if I should cancel.
Southwest is the best low fare airline. I’m interested to see how Southwest will look when operations return to normal. Customers will continue to choose Southwest due to low fares, no bag fees etc. regardless of the Twitter rants. However, I’m curious what percentage of business will not return (you could argue that people who can afford American, United, etc. weren’t flying Southwest in the first place).
People's outrage only last a few days. They will go back to booking Southwest a few months later when they realize they don't have that many options..
What a colossal screw up for SWA. That said, I will probably still continue to fly them. Hobby is more convenient to me than IAH, and SWA offers more nonstop options to my typical destinations than the others. I absolutely loathe connections. I try to avoid checking bags as much as I can, it is so much easier to troubleshoot delays/cancellations when you don't have to track baggage. One time my flight to Tampa got cancelled, the next gate over was a direct flight to Orlando, I spoke to the gate attendant and they got me on right away - just having a carryon made that so much easier. I then took an Uber from Orlando to Tampa, saved me an entire day as the only other option was to wait for another Tampa flight late that evening.
That's what it comes down to ultimately...convenience. You live closer to HOU so you're going to use what's available to you there. I live in Spring so I'm really not wanting to drive to Hobby. Now that SWA flies out of IAH, I consider them more but the options are pretty limited so I pretty much stick to Delta or United. When I lived in Austin, it was almost exclusively SWA. I was going to have to connect anyway so might as well pay a little less and take advantage of their frequent flier program. I had the credit card and I traveled a lot so I was racking up points and status quickly. Once I moved, that pretty much stopped. Luckily, I'm able to use up the rest of my points on a trip out of IAH with SWA but that'll probably be it for me with them.
SWA has been operating on a 30 year old platform. It's been in need of complete replacement for about 10-15 years now. Maybe this will finally break that camel's back. All that being said, I fly SWA every single time if possible because flying in America is like choosing the tallest dwarf. They all suck but at least SWA tries to care.
Interesting. I’ve never had an issue with southwest flights. Never had a cancellation, lost luggage, bad experience, etc. I virtually only flew southwest my entire life until recently when I started making enough money to actually take vacation — not just staycations (which quite frankly I prefer). but what do people expect trying to fly on a holiday when traffic is 100x heavier and there’s a massive snow storm enveloping half the country almost?
In the end you gotta fly who you are stuck having to fly based on times of flights and cost. I make my company pay for me to fly AA but personally when I’m paying sometimes it just has to happen with Spirit or Frontier. This week though nobody has been spared the chaos despite what you read on the news about it being a SWA problem. Even AA last night flying out of DFW (my friends flight) had a pilot just not show up, and they were delayed from 4:30 to 9. Our AA flight earlier in the AM was so bad from turbulence a flight attendant got sick on the flight and another said it was the worst she’s experienced. Flying is just always going to be an unreliable form of transportation with the crazy weather we’ll continue to keep having. SWA has a systems collapse that has possibly destroyed their business or will take years to recover from, but that system doesn’t collapse if the weather system didn’t happen. Regardless of the weather I just assume on every flight I book that there’s almost no way I’ll be on time and I plan for what’ll happen if they cancel it. Prepare your family too for that possibility. Flying in 2022 just isn’t what it used to be and it’s unlikely to get better.
Some cancellations are expected. Southwest's implosion is on another magnitude compared to other airlines. I'm curious how they'll recover from this. Probably another huge government bailout.
Ding. I try to reduce as many variables as possible for air travel as so many things can go wrong. Ask those xmas travelers how they feel about that $50 savings now? I also avoid any company that creates walled gardens and proprietary solutions. The fact that SWA doesn't list their flights on any aggregator sites, much less allows you to book flights elsewhere, is behavior I can't support. That behavior doesn't help customers. They only do it to obscure other airlines to lock you into their system. They treat their customers like cattle, evidenced by how they board the plane. SWA made an amazing (albeit lucky) business decision to hedge their fuel purchases allowing them to undercut the competition and drive-up market share at a time all the other airlines were starting to charge baggage fees. That was marketing gold and they built a cult like following. We'll see if that blind loyalty takes a hit. Another kudo, they treat their employees very well, and it shows.
It's air travel. If you do it enough, you're gonna get popped eventually. Bad weather cannot be helped. Southwest non-stops are the safest bets for uninterrupted travel in the entire industry IMO.
