Southwest promises refunds as it plans to restore normal flights on Friday
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Unions at Southwest Airlines have been warning for years that the carrier's technology systems badly need an upgrade.
PHOTO: NYTIMES
WASHINGTON – Southwest Airlines has promised to reimburse passengers for expenses such as hotels and car rentals, in addition to refunding tickets, after it cancelled thousands of flights due to a massive winter storm and said there would be a still-undetermined hit to its earnings.
“There’ll certainly be an impact to the fourth quarter,” chief commercial officer Ryan Green told reporters on a call on Thursday. “We’re working through all the financial elements of this. We’ll share that information when we have all that compiled and are ready to do that.”
Some analysts estimate the meltdown could shave as much as 9 per cent off Southwest’s fourth-quarter earnings.
Southwest said on Thursday it plans to return to normal operations on Friday after days of running at a third of its usual capacity due to disruptions triggered by a massive winter storm that swept much of the United States around the Christmas holiday.
The storm forced airlines to cancel thousands of flights around the holiday weekend, but Southwest’s problems deepened while other carriers largely recovered.
On Thursday, the airline had 2,357 cancelled flights, or 58 per cent, far more than other carriers, according to airline data tracker FlightAware.
Southwest plans to return to normal flight schedules on Friday, the airline said in a statement, adding it was eager to get back to normal ahead of the New Year holiday weekend.
The carrier has cancelled more than 16,000 flights since Friday.
US Transport Secretary Pete Buttigieg said on Wednesday Southwest’s difficulties went beyond being a weather-driven issue and indicated a “system failure”.
He said President Joe Biden will hold Southwest “accountable” if it fails to fulfil commitments to customers for “controllable delays and cancellations”.
Employee unions say they have been warning management at Southwest that its technology systems badly need upgrades.
Flight attendants have been complaining about technological failures at the airline for years, according to Ms Lyn Montgomery, president of the Southwest Airlines Flight Attendants Union.
The union has raised the issue repeatedly, including in contract negotiations since 2018, she said.
“There’re many ways it could have been avoided,” Ms Montgomery said on Thursday on CNN.
The comments echoed those of the Southwest Airlines Pilots Association, which said the company failed to adapt operations to address repeated systems failures, despite years of calls for improvements by the union.
“The holiday meltdown has been blamed on weather that had been forecast five days prior. But this problem began many years ago, when the complexity of our network outgrew its ability to withstand meteorological and technological disruptions,” it said in a statement on Wednesday.
Improvements it called for included changes to crew scheduling software and communication tools that would have allowed displaced crews to remain in contact with the company.
Company officials acknowledged that current problems stem, in part, from an inability of internal logistics and scheduling systems to recover after widespread storm disruptions.
“We have much work ahead of us, including investing in new solutions to manage wide-scale disruptions,” Southwest said on Thursday. REUTERS, NYTIMES
