More than 10,000 flights canceled in a few days, chaos at airports and a persistent mess: Southwest Airlines, much more affected than other American airlines by the extreme cold wave in the United States, found itself on Tuesday under the fire of criticism.
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“It’s a real debacle,” lamented Mike Sage, who hoped to return to Florida on Monday following spending Christmas with his children in Connecticut.
Unable for this traveler to reach Southwest by phone, internet or app.
At the airport, following a two-hour queue, he did get a new reservation for Saturday. But handing him the ticket, the employee whispered to him: “I would be you, I would not count on it too much (…). We have crews stuck everywhere, pilots sleeping on the ground in airports,” he told AFP.
Getty Images via AFP
The other major airlines in the country have also faced difficulties, Delta and United, for example, having canceled 1,835 and 1,257 flights respectively between Thursday and Monday, according to the Flight Aware site.
But with the rise in temperatures, activity resumed on Tuesday: American, United, Delta and JetBlue thus posted cancellation rates of 0% to 2%. Not at Southwest.
After canceling more than 70% of its flights on Monday, the company cut more than 60% once more on Tuesday, warning that it would only take off regarding a third of its planned routes “over the next few days”.
On social networks, there are many photos of long queues in front of Southwest kiosks and unclaimed suitcases.
The management has apologized for a situation which it describes itself as “unacceptable”.
“We had all the necessary personnel and were prepared” as the Christmas weekend approached, Southwest assures on its website.
But the extreme cold and heavy snowfall that hit the United States for several days, killing at least 50 people, severely disrupted activity.
For the unions, however, the company’s failures stem from deeper causes: the combination of a more dispersed network of routes than that of other major American companies, which often revolve around a few key airports, and a system of employee assignments exceeded.
Under these conditions, the crews are sometimes “in the wrong place, without a plane”, explained the vice-president of the union of the company’s pilots, Mike Santoro, on CNN.
Software “doesn’t know where we are, where the planes are. It’s frustrating for pilots, stewards and stewardesses, and of course passengers,” he added.
The exasperation is shared by the company’s flight attendants union, TWU Local 556.
“We know the requirements of holiday periods. We know winter storms. And believe me, we know how to increase the pace and work long hours, ”said its president, Lyn Montgomery, in a press release.
But “the management has failed for several years to resolve the situation, leaving the aircrew tired, stranded, hungry and in the cold – at Christmas!”, She denounced. Employees were put on hold for several hours on the phone before being assigned a flight.
Improving the IT infrastructure is one of the main demands of the company’s unions.
Sanctioned on the stock market, the action of Southwest lost nearly 6% on Wall Street on Tuesday.
The cancellation of the Christmas holidays for tens of thousands of passengers is “a nightmare” for the image of the company, note analysts from Briefing.com. It is difficult to quantify the consequences of the episode, but it will surely have a short-term impact, if only for refunds due to customers.
However, it should fade in the longer term, say these analysts.
The US government has in any case taken up the subject, the Department of Transport considering that the rate of cancellations and delays of the company as well as the lack of appropriate responses to customers were “unacceptable”.
US President Joe Biden, for his part, assured in a tweet that his administration was working to ensure that companies “take their responsibilities”, while the chair of a Senate committee, Maria Cantwell, announced her intention to investigate the causes of disruption and its impact on passengers.