Used to be that if a flight was cancelled that airlines would book you on a competitor if that was your best option for getting to your destination. I just had a flight cancelled and Soutwest refused to rebook on a different airline. Has that policy changed? Is this just something Southwest does?
I’ve been fortunate enough to only rarely need to be rebooked due to flight delays or cancellations, and both times (both with American), they simply booked me on a later flight from the same airline.
Amusingly enough, the first time, they rebooked me onto a later flight not because my scheduled flight was delayed or cancelled, but because they fully expected my connecting flight to be due to weather in Chicago. The other flight left an hour and a half later, connected in DFW, and got me to my destination about two hours sooner than the original flight would have had I stuck with that one.
The second time, the plane’s computers were on the fritz, and I kid you not, they resorted to turning the entire plane on and off again with us all sitting there ready to take off before they gave up and cancelled the flight.
It honestly didn’t occur to me to try and get booked on a competing flight, but then neither time was I traveling on business, so I wasn’t exactly on a strict time table.
Just this last July I had a three leg flight on United. I got a notice that my last flight was cancelled so I was rebooked on American.
It depends on the agreements the specific airlines have with other airlines; some will rebook on other carriers, others won’t. It’s been a while since I worked in the airline industry, but my guess is that Southwest, being a discount carrier, has no agreements with anyone so you’re out of luck if they can’t get you where you’re going.
The old guard airlines (American, Delta, United, etc) are the ones who tend to have agreements with each other. No guarantee, though. I got stuck in Chicago overnight once last year because I missed a connection (airline’s fault, not mine) and the only other carrier that flew to where I was going was Delta, and American and Delta have no agreement.
As noted, it depends on the carrier. I’ve never had a problem getting re-booked onto another airline if that is what it took, but I don’t fly Southwest. :o
If you’re flying on business, you can always contact your travel agency and have them re-book you.
I think it’s as with the rest of airline booking black magic – it all depends on a lot of factors. Southwest certainly has no overt arrangements with other airlines, but even American will re-book on Delta despite being in a completely different marketing universe. I suspect some mix of pestering, airline elite status, original fare category, cause of cancellation, …, and on and on feed into it.
Although Southwest has many policies and practices that make them very popular among travelers, this is one place where Southwest’s service really falls down.
Southwest has no interline agreements with other carriers. In order to rebook you on another airline, they would have to pay the airline full fare to carry you and they simply are not going to do that and their Contract of Carriage does not require them to. If you want an alternate flight on another carrier, you’re going to have to pay for it yourself.
Aye, this is one downside to Southwest. They do their own thing, and don’t seem to want to interact much with the rest of the travel industry. Once you’re booked on Southwest, you’re pretty much stuck on Southwest.
You may also note that you won’t find Southwest flights on the travel-service web sites (Expedia, Travelocity, etc.)
i was stuck in Baltimore last summer when Southwest’s computers died.
The fellow passengers, with no cash concerns, went down the street and purchased a flight from another airline.
Southwest told me they wouldn’t book me on another airline. That was after I spent 3.5 hours in line.
I was there for over 24 hours before I could continue. No cots. I slept on the floor, next to an outlet to plug in my CPAP.
They gave me three $14 vouchers to use at the concessions. I immediately turned them into hand crafted draft beer.
They also gave me a $200 voucher for a future flight. It had a short expiration date. And a 50% discount on future flights that expires in June 2017.
My wife and I had a two leg flight to Japan: United from Toronto to Chicago and Japan Airlines from Chicago to Tokyo. The United flight was delayed and we missed the JAL flight. The United clerk said they could put us on an All Nippon Airways flight (United’s partner in the Star Alliance), but JAL customer service refused to transfer our tickets (because then they would have to pay ANA). So we had to stay in a shitty airport hotel overnight and fly to Tokyo the next morning on JAL’s next flight.
What really made me furious was that another passenger on the same United flight was able to switch from JAL to ANA, but the customer service rep we had refused to do the same for us!
My last trip returning from Colombia had the final leg from Miami to Grand Cayman on Cayman Airways cancelled. Cayman Airways did have a flight scheduled later that night but the customer service agent was unsure if it would be cancelled too so she rebooked me on American even before I asked. They even reimbursed me for the baggage fees that American charged.
The answer is both. Southwest Airlines never rebooked on different airlines if your flight was cancelled. Other airlines generally used to do so. However, they are cutting back on this practice, and often nowadays will refuse to do so.
The issue is whether the airlines have interline agreements, and more and more airlines do not.
The flight was rebooked for the next day, but then the second flight was cancelled. Then they said the best they could do was rebook for a couple of days later. Talk about lousy customer service. Had to just get a refund and book on a different airline myself.
I vaguely recall reading some time in 2016 that Delta felt it wasn’t getting fair treatment in these deals and was pulling out. But I can’t find an article so as always take what I write with a grain of salt.
Other folks have adequately covered Southwest’s non-participation in the industry interline system. They play their own game by their own rules.
Ref this:
You’d be surprised how often that cures a mysterious problem. The power sources for the really key computers are so redundant and well-protected that the only way to force an end-to-end hard reboot is to shut down engines and turn off all power of all kinds. Then wait a couple minutes before going through the whole power-up process that passengers almost never see because pilots or ground crew normally do it at the start of each work day an hour or more before boarding.
It’s cheap, and quicker than taxiing back to the gate, deboarding, calling in a mechanic, etc. The odds of a fix are not high, but they’re not zero either.
Now that aircraft have dozens of computers with lots of internal self checks and cross-checks, there’s lots of ways for the start-up process to detect and latch what looks like a malfunction when it’s actually just an artifact of one component waking up a bit slower than its counter-party expects.
The PITA for us is we’ve got a large data entry task to re-do once it all wakes up again and reports that it’s healthy. Meanwhile the airplane is running normally and you’re all sitting there wondering “What’s the hold-up now??”
Oh, I know it solves many problems, I’ve seen it happen with personal computers, and I have no reason to believe that it works differently for other computers. I just thought it was very funny at the time that they were turning the plane off and on again to troubleshoot a problem with it.
When I tell this story, I always wait till after the “turn it off and on again” bit to clarify that the plane hadn’t left the ground yet at this point. 
You get what you pay for. I understand that you were in a shitty situation and I sympathize but I don’t get why you expect premium customer service at cut rate prices.
Exactly. When their computers failed, I figured the IT department payroll was cut rate, also.
Go with the cheapo airline and it is an adventure.
Ah, yes, the ever-unread “Contract of Carriage”. People tend to get surprised at what is not included in their ticket price.
But yeah this is something that is becoming ever more common; on top of that even when there are agreements it’s harder to find a routing to give you as the airlines schedule flights and seats ever more tightly to optimize yield so there’s precious little spare space.
This is where some old-timer brings up that his DC-3 could go even if half of everything were on the fritz or shot thru with flak.
Apart from the Southwest thing, this is not a service I get on my cheap tickets. It is a service my boss gets on his travel contract: if his airline can’t put him on a flight, the contract requires them to put him on an airline that can. Normally, this is not a problem. Normally, when it is a problem, they bump someone else rather than puting him with another airline. But if they drop a flight, the contract requires them to use any other available flight.