Southwest cancels 5,400 flights in less than 48 hours. Stocks Crash like hell.

Southwest Stock Falls: Has the Once-Loved Airline Lost Its Edge? After it cancels 5,400 flights in less than 48 hours in a ‘full-blown meltdown

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Travelers wait at a Southwest Airlines baggage counter after flight cancellations hit Los Angeles International Airport on Monday. The airline warns it will fly about one-third of its schedule for the next several days.
Eugene Garcia/AP

A historic winter storm has complicated holiday travel and brought perilous circumstances to a large portion of the United States, but no airline has suffered more than Southwest Airlines to navigate the Christmas holiday demand.

According to flight tracker FlightAware, Southwest cancelled more than 2,900 flights on Monday — at least 70% of its day programme — and more than 2,500 flights on Tuesday as of 9:10 a.m. ET — at least 60% of its schedule. The delays add to the confusion that has left thousands trapped at airports around the country, many of whom have no idea when they will be able to return home or where their bags are.

Southwest had more than ten times the amount of cancelled flights on Monday as Delta, which had the second-highest number of cancellations by a U.S. airline with 265 flights cancelled. In the last week, several airlines have also requested large-scale cancellations.

Southwest says its crew scheduling process is partly to blame

Southwest spokeswoman Chris Perry told NPR that the airline’s problems are the result of the winter storm’s lasting impacts, and that the company wants to “stabilise and strengthen its business” with better weather.

Other challenges that have increased the airline’s struggle to meet the holiday demand include difficulties “connecting flight personnel to their schedules,” according to Perry. Employees have found it difficult to use crew scheduling systems and obtain reassignments as a result of this issue.

Kyle Potter, executive editor of Thrifty Traveler, described the difficulty of coordinating staffing and scheduling for an airline with a network as large as Southwest’s as “extremely hard,” especially following weather delays.

However, with clear skies in many regions on Monday, the airline seemed to have few obvious grounds to cancel so many flights. Potter describes it as a “full-blown meltdown.”

“This is really as bad as it gets for an airline,” Potter said. “We’ve seen this again and again over the course of the last year or so, when airlines really just struggle especially after a storm, but there’s pretty clear skies across the country.”

In a statement issued Monday, the airline stated that it will fly around one-third of its scheduled flights over the next several days as it works to restore its operations.

The cancellations, delays, and customer service response were deemed “unacceptable” by the US Department of Transportation.

“The Department will examine whether cancellations were controllable and if Southwest is complying with its customer service plan,” USDOT said in a statement.

Holiday travelers see their plans upended

Southwest’s situation began to deteriorate before the Christmas holiday. The fact that widespread cancellations persist on Monday, according to Potter, “is a clear, unmistakable evidence that something has gone dreadfully wrong.”

Passengers are tweeting photographs and videos of crowded baggage claim areas and long waits at reservation counters from Houston, Texas, and Tampa, Florida, to Cleveland, Ohio, and Denver, Colorado. According to Colorado Public Radio, hold times on Southwest’s customer support phone lines averaged more than two hours, sometimes surpassing four hours.

“I’m okay with these travel situations and fly on by myself when it’s just me, but when my one-year-old has to suffer through it because of ineptitude and mismanagement, that becomes personal,” Southwest passenger Joshua Caudle, who said he was unsure when they would be able to leave Denver, said on Denver7 News. “I’m never going to do this with that company again.”

After many delays and cancellations to flights out of Kansas City International Airport, a Southwest customer who claims she was attempting to fly from Missouri to Denver said she missed spending Christmas with her family. Despite the fact that she was grounded, her luggage was sent to Denver without her, she tweeted.

Airlines are experiencing increased demand.

Airlines have been fighting to recover after losing tens of billions of dollars during the worst months of the pandemic. Airlines have been hampered by staffing shortages as they try to accommodate Americans’ comeback to air travel. And Southwest is hardly the only airline that has struggled to meet demand.

This summer, thousands of Delta pilots picketed at major airports, demanding more compensation and exposing staff concerns as passengers faced flight cancellations during the Fourth of July holiday rush. Delta pilots voted last month to approve a strike after contract negotiations stalled.

“Every airline across the country, Southwest included, got really small at the start of the pandemic when travel basically fell off a cliff, and they have struggled as travel has rebounded to grow back up to 100% and they’re still not there,” Potter said.