My Wife and I drove from the mountains down to Denver Friday the 23rd. 100 miles. No big deal at all. We drove back Christmas, roads where completely clear by that point. I mean dry.
True. If you remember the luggage system disaster when the new Denver airport opened, that was the airport’s fault, not any airline.
The Heathrow disaster I already mentioned included a mountain of luggage from passengers whose flights were canceled.
Our flight to LAS is canceled for tomorrow. We are supposed to go out Friday, but I’m not hopeful. At least the room rate at my daughter’s is cheap, and I get to see my grandkids a bit longer.
This is the part about the luggage thing that I am not understanding. You go to the airport, check your luggage, and then your flight is cancelled. You and your luggage are still at the airport, albeit not together. Do people leave the airport without their luggage? I suppose if you are at your home airport you could just find a way home and then come back later to find your bag, but it seems like the issue now is luggage and passenger are not even in the same airport - how does that happen? It’s like flights are landing and unloading luggage but passengers are somewhere else?
Here’s just a few ways this goes wrong. …
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Person arrives for flight, checks luggage. Flight cancels before baggage is loaded. it’ll be 3 hours before there’s anyone available to move those bags to a carousel. Meanwhile passenger leaves airport.
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Passenger arrives at hub on flight A intending to connect to flight B. Passenger checked baggage at origin which is aboard flight A. Flight A is late and passenger runs to catch flight B, getting aboard a couple minutes before they stop boarding. It will be at least an hour before the baggage from flight A can be unloaded, sorted, and put onto flights B, D, Q, & Z going to wherever. Does the airline delay flight B until the connecting bags are onboard from flights A, K, R, & T, or do they go now to avoid even bigger problems downstream? They go now.
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After the above scenario has happened several times there is now more baggage destined for destination X piled up than will fit on the next flight. Do we prioritize moving the baggage for the passengers aboard, or the baggage that’s been sitting the longest? Or the smallest stuff so the most pieces get there soonest?
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If the weather sucks, we often have to carry extra fuel. If the weather sucks over a widespread region, we often have to carry mongo amounts of extra fuel. The weight of which limits our capacity for passengers and/or baggage. If we have 150 seats, is it better to take 150 people but just 130 peoples-worth of baggage, or 140 people and their 140 peoples-worth of baggage? Of course we’ve already sold every seat and due to cancellations there are 100 people standing by, so leaving 10 seats empty seems stupid. If we do leave 10 people off, we may or may not be able to prevent their bags from getting aboard. Bags are not loaded in exact sync with the person passing the gate scanner. So now some people get where they’re going with their bags, some people are at the destination while their bags are back at the origin, and other people are at the origin while their bags are already at the destination.
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If there’s shit weather at this airport, every bit of the ground-handling process goes slower. Which increases baggage misconnects. And maybe 10 or 15% of your ground workers no-showed after being stuck in the snow, crashed their car driving in, schools closed & they’ve got to watch the kids, etc.
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A baggage train goes around dropping bags for flight A at gate 12, flight B at gate 22, and flight C at gate 24. Unfortunately that driver didn’t know that flight C was moved to gate 37 at the last minute and the jet in gate 24 is actually flight J. Or that the jet in gate 22 isn’t flight B. But is the delayed previous flight that hasn’t departed yet, while flight B’s jet is still holding someplace awaiting its chance to arrive at gate 22, de-board, unload, and become flight B.
I think part of the issue of “waiting it out” is that, right now, it doesn’t appear that waiting a few days is a guarantee that you’re going to get on a Southwest flight.
In 2014, my wife and I were in Orlando, when an employee at the air traffic control center outside of Chicago attempted to commit suicide by locking himself in a computer room and lighting the room on fire. The fire knocked out that center, and caused massive flight cancellations in and out of Chicago. Our flight home to Chicago got cancelled, and while the airline told us that they could re-book us on another flight leaving a few days later, at that point, there was no guarantee that that flight was going to go, either.
So, we rented a car, and drove – yes, it was a two-day drive, and yes, it was an additional expense, but at least, at that point, our trip home was under our control. That’s got to be one of the biggest frustrations that travelers are dealing with this week, with Southwest: there are no real answers being given yet, and if they are stuck waiting for a Southwest flight, they’re in limbo right now.
If the flight is actually cancelled, or you cancel your reservation, the airport should return the luggage. However, if the flight is just delayed or rescheduled they’ll probably keep it in their system indefinitely because otherwise tracking what luggage was returned or retained is a logistical nightmare. The assumption, of course, is that a ‘delayed’ flight is only for a few hours, not days on end.
A number of years ago, post-9/11 but before the current comprehensive TSA luggage screening, my flight was ‘delayed’ by 24 hours. (Fuckin’ Continental!</john mcclane>). By being polite and telling a sob story about how my highly important shit was in my bag I was able to convince a counter agent to go retrieve the bag for me. However, a few years ago I got diverted to an entirely different airport after more than half a day of waiting, and not only was I told that they were not able to retrieve the bag because it was in TSA impound, it actually got sent on to my original destination and I had to make an extra trip to go collect it.
These days, I pack light enough for a carry on (and in a backpack, not a rollerbag, so if we get the “all overhead bins are full” message, I can squeeze it into whatever space is available or shove it under the seat), and everything else gets shipped UPS. When I was in Japan there was actually a service where you could go to a convenience store and have them ship your bag to your destination—usually same day—for some nominal fee and you didn’t have to worry about it. I wish we had that in the US because it was incredibly convenient, even though they wouldn’t take my folding kayak.
Stranger
Part of the problem is Southwest keeps insisting on rescheduling people to avoid refunds.
Like ShipGo?
It was even cheaper and more convenient. As I recall, the fee for a standard 20 kg or under bag was something like ¥1100 (about US$12 at the time), and you could drop it at any convenience store (which is basically the grocery in Japan). Although I think they advertised a two-day turnaround it usually arrived within a day and once actually beat me to my destination in Okinawa. I think the Japanese post office also offered inexpensive international shipping but I just paid the oversized fee on my kayak bag and put everything in there to keep my other large bag under the weight limit.
Stranger
I see in the Times that SWA has had almost 12000 cancelled flights in the last week. The only way to solve that is if all the passengers at their origin just go home and you try to deal with the people who need to get home. Even so, that is a metric shit-ton of people.
Black Cat. Used them many times. I’d teach a HAZMAT class in Kure for two weeks. Have a week off to travel with my wife (used our tourist passports to get the sweet deals for JNR Shinkansen travel. Send our stuff to the next hotel, friend’s house and travel light to Osaka then Tokyo. Teach more and travel.
You know what this whole debacle has me thinking? Maybe we shouldn’t be trying to fly all at once, at a time of the year when the weather sucks.
Seriously, why does Xmas have to be in December? There’s nothing going on in August - let’s do it then. And we won’t have blizzards mucking things up. I’ve told my family I’m not going to travel to them on major holidays anymore. It just doesn’t make sense.
I realize I’m pissing into the wind hoping for that sort of cultural change, but there’s a portion of this problem that we have brought on ourselves.
All that said, I was on an airline flight yesterday without incident, thankfully. My charter flying this week is busy, but so far without issue.
Couldn’t agree more. It’s about getting together. Has not a thing to do with what day it is.
I guess. I like the cultural ritual myself, especially since there are believers in my midst and attach special importance to celebrating holy days together. I’m a non-believer, but I still like these sorts of customs. In all my years of flying, over a hundred or two domestic and international flights, this is the only one I’ve ever had cancelled that I remember (which is why I wasn’t sure what to do) and that includes about forty flights over either Thanksgiving or Christmas. Well, we did make it to Phoenix with no issue on American last night, so all is good.
My carrier sailed through the winter storm with minor disruption and no snowballing meltdown. As did most of the rest of the major league players. SWA is hurting badly, but the fact they crashed when nobody else did implies something unique to them, not to the weather or the holiday’s non-optimal timing that we all contended with.
Lest anyone think I sound smug talking down about Those People, rest assured I’m not. Any given airline can blow up on any given week. It’s mostly about hubris and nemesis, assuming that less stuff will go wrong than is realistic, then duly being brought up short by unlucky reality. Going for the optimistic Big Score weather be damned works sometimes and fails spectacularly sometimes. They might have been heroes and instead they’re goats. Every brand has made this mistake one month or another.
Agree. But the degree that SWA has singularly failed this time is noteworthy - their entire operation has failed all at once, from assets and crews out of position, to baggage handling, to IT, to communications. It’s been a while since one company has failed so miserably, so publically.
Yes. This will be a B-school case for the ages. Assuming SWA ever lets some academics poke deeply enough into their embarrassing secrets to understand what really happened.
IMO SWA has been riding on their fun touchy-feely “We’re the nice guys. And the cheap guys” reputation long after that’s become not nearly as true as it once was. The reputational consequences of this mess may eventually be far larger than it first appears right now.
Once the public decides, accurately or not, that SWA is just another annoying airline indistinguishable from all the rest, they’ll find themselves in a very different struggle vs the rest of the industry.
Has there been a call for the resignation of Southwest CEO Bob Jordan? It could be argued that his policies were one of the factors leading to this mess.
I doubt it would happen unless this hurt their profitability long term.
Perhaps the FAA should set some regulations around the busy travel times that airlines can’t be at 100% capacity. They have to have X% slack capacity so that minor disruptions can be absorbed. As it is now, all the airlines seem to be over 100% capacity. Even small issues cause huge ripples. Set the slack percentage to be relative to how busy the travel day is. Thanksgiving would have the most slack, Christmas a little less, and so on for the top travel days. Something like that should help busy travel days not end up with mass delays, cancellations, and frustrated travelers.
Probably, but that seems like blaming the last guy holding the bag. He’s only been on the job 10 months, which means this is much more likely a problem built over the years or decades before he got the job.
What I’m reading indicates Jordan was actually working on some of the issues but couldn’t change 20 years of bad decisions instantly.
That seems to be the case with a lot of companies. A would-be Jack Welch (or a series of them) comes in, hollows out the basic infrastructure and talent pool in search of lower costs and short term profits, things run pretty well on inertia for a while, and the ones primarily responsible are long gone by the time the bill comes due.