I am affected by this. We got halfway into our flight only to find our next leg was cancelled. SWA will not (cannot?) rebook anyone until the 31st. Our return flight was going to be Sunday, so we rebooked from our halfway stop back home on Sunday.
Here are some crazy things I have encountered.
Rental cars in our city are sold out. Same for cities within two hours drive. The websites will accept reservations, but when you show up, they tell you they have no cars. Because it's the holidays, busses and trains are booked and any flights on other airlines are crazy expensive ($1500 one way). When you are stuck in a city, you are probably truly stuck there.
Your only hope of dealing with SWA is waiting in line at check-in or a gate. The phones don't work. Online chat doesn't work. The lines are long and slow.
Luggage is hit or miss. If your bag was pulled off a plane, you might find it in baggage claim, but most bags are on a plane or on the tarmac. SWA told us it may be 30 days until we get our luggage. They won't pull bags for people, and the agents that we spoke with acknowledged and felt for people who may have had medicine in them.
The workers are as befuddled as the passengers. They have been very nice and as helpful as they can be, but their phones haven't been working and their computer systems have been slow.
On Twitter, someone posted a video of the announcement at Houston Hobby about no flights until the 31st and people keeping their receipts for hotels, etc. They said the same thing at our airport.
People in the airport are so mad. It's unfortunate because it's not constructive. But tempers are flaring, and frustrated passengers who finally get to talk to an agent end up slowing things down because they spend a lot of time trying to hear something they're not going to hear.
Ultimately, this is an operations failure. Companies talk a lot about accountability, but the typical way you hold people accountable is by replacing them with more capable people. It will be very interesting to see if any executives leave SWA over this. If not, I would say that no one was held accountable.
To close, my family and I are fine. This is but a minor speed bump in life. No one is dying, and we will see how SWA takes care of the extra expenditures. Some people aren't so lucky. They have meds in bags, or finances that don't allow them to spend multiple nights in a hotel and get Uber trips for a few days. Hopefully, SWA takes care of them, too.
If there are no cars available near you, and you want to drive, try U-Haul or similar truck rental places. It’s probably not going to be a super comfortable ride, but you might get home.
That's a good idea, but not really feasible for a family. After the rental car fell through, we resigned ourselves to not getting to our destination and decided to make the most of the situation we have (explore a new city we have never experienced beyond an airport or a highway) and solidified our return flight.
the other 3 (expensive) hacks I can think of are charter a flight, and draft people stuck in the same situation to help defray costs, rent a 15-passenger van or bus to do it; buy any vehicle you can find and then resell it at the other end
For those in a situation you may want to consider renting a truck from Uhaul or similar. They’re only open during business hours and will be way more expensive but a vehicle is a vehicle.
I can’t say I recommend then offering to shove everyone else in the back.
This has been one of the reasons I heavily lean toward direct flights now - that way if stranded im either at home or my destination.
There used to be a website where you could post that you were driving from A to B and other people could opt in to go with you and hitch a seat. That would be great for stuff like this.
Friend of mine used something like this to get from LA to the bay area.
The car had 2 girls in it who hotboxed the car the entire 6 hour drive, then missed his exit near San Jose and got pulled over for an unrelated reason.
Says if he wasn't married now he would do it again in a heartbeat.
I used something like this to get from Berlin to Amsterdam. I wasn't hotboxed but did get to spend the ride chatting with an attractive fashion student. It was cool because I'm not involved in fashion at all but my uni was using that industry for a lot of examples in lessons.
My local uhaul charges a day rate and $1/mile, and gas is on you. Still you can get lucky if they need to move a truck your way. They'll practically give it to you.
Thanks for the update. I’m sure the people around you appreciate the calm you’re demonstrating. I hope you’re able to salvage some of your holiday plans.
I had a similar situation happen to me on my way back from a wedding. Got stuck in Charlotte with two small kids. It made me realize a bit more tangibly how absolutely terrible our public transportation is here in the US.
I don't know the cause of your specific situation. But with respect to 5400 cancelled flights, I'd be surprised to hear that there's a transportation system (public + private combined) that can handle a sudden and unexpected influx at a time where things are already at peak-capacity (holidays)
No, but in my particular situation (which predates the Southwest issue), had I been in Japan, Korea, a decent European, etc I could have managed to get a train ride from a city the size of Charlotte to a city the size of my hometown.
Me thinks you are quite right: back of the napkin math indicates the average flight carries 64.44 passengers. So just the Southwest flight cancellations stranded 347,976 passengers. That’s a lot of people to re-route.
Southwest boards three groups of up to 60 passengers each. Every Southwest flight I have taken post-pandemic has been full. I’d bump that average up to the 120-180 range for Southwest flights this time of year.
Yeah, but they're not all in one place. If the US had a genuinely functional public transport system, I doubt there would be much problem finding seats for all or the vast majority of the stranded people on trains going to or near their destinations.
There's 2 types of public transport: intra-city and inter-city. Intra-city doesn't serve the same use case as flying, and can't generally be repurposed to inter-city transport, so it should be discounted. If the US had inter-city rail that people actually used, then it would almost certainly be near capacity in a normal holiday season. Unless you assume there are a lot of extra train cars that aren't normally being used but could be taken out of storage, there's no way that it could absorb such a large influx of stranded passengers on short notice. Inter-city rail generally operates like airplanes in that only one ticket can be sold for each seat - there's no standing room on a multi-hour train ride.
> They won't pull bags for people, and the agents that we spoke with acknowledged and felt for people who may have had medicine in them.
Casual reminder to keep all medicine in your carry-on! Even gate-checked bags get delayed and lost. I never realized that could happen with a gate-check until it happened to me. They loaded all of the gate-checked bags onto our plane, but then that put it over a weight limit, so they took a pallet or two of them off and put them on another flight. Of course, it was a complicated multi-leg international flight to boot.
Anybody who puts important meds into checked luggage is really to blame for their problems. Bags get lost even when airlines don't have catastrophic breakdowns of their normal operations and taking this risk is really not necessary as meds can totally be carried in carry-on. It's really unfortunate that this is causing problems for people but it's totally preventable.
Your getting downvoted a lot - but as someone who has been racking up north of 100k miles/year for five years pre-pandemic (somewhat less now) - anytime I checked luggage I essentially needed to be mentally and emotionally prepared to say goodbye to it. I booked my tickets with Chase Sapphire which has very good missing luggage/toiletries/etc... insurance - and had my luggage go missing five times in as many years - though, I will say, all five times I had the airline deliver it to my destination hotel within 48 hours.
Regardless - don't check anything you aren't prepared to say goodbye to.
Yes, but I think the comment is being downvoted for tone, not accuracy. It’s not nice to lecture people when they’re down, even if they’ll never read it.
You shouldn't be downvoted for this. Southwest (and other airlines) specifically recommend bringing all medication in carry-on bags. I have had checked bags delayed multiple days on other airlines. It happens.
There being a possibility of a negative event providing motivation for a strategy to mitigate the event doesn't provide justification for realizing the negative event through sheer incompetence nor does advertising your incompetence ahead of time clear you of the blame for said incompetence.
Except that even if you only bring a carry on, it’s not guaranteed that you won’t be hit with the “we’ll have to check this bag free of charge for you”. I’ve been in my seat, the lady takes my bag down from
The storage to fit something else, can’t fit my bag back, and decides to check my bag without even talking to me. Other times it happens as you walk down the aisle and find no room, it’s very common.
Meh, it's avoidable. I travel with a medium-big backpack as my only carry on, usually, and have never been gate-checked. The roller bags which barely fit in the overheads and have no compressibility are the ones that get gate checked.
So you travel for a meeting for a day and back? Ever travelled from warm weather to cold weather? Ever travelled to a place where you’ll need two types of shoes? Or multi city with different weathers, different engagements… I don’t know how you can believe that “you can just travel with a small backpack anywhere!” “If I did it, it must work for everyone!” “99% of the people have carry ons bigger than a backpack because they are stupid and literally do it for no reason”. Is that the logic you’re following? I don’t get it.
But also I've traveled for a month (us to India) from my backpack. One week of clothes, a laptop, some cables, notebook and pens, perhaps a couple more books, a few toiletries. And still some room for one 'fun' thing, like a small synthesizer to jam on.
It's a bit like ultralight backpacking; you can cut down quite a lot one you get in the mindset. I definitely don't claim it works for everyone... But probably most people can travel rather lighter than they normally do.
Fwiw, my travel backpack is pretty similar to this one. Definitely a bit bigger than the standard backpack, much smaller than a hiking backpack, and rather smaller than a roller bag.
100% agree that happens, and frequently, but it's also perfectly avoidable - don't try to maximize volume. Bring a carry on that fits underneath a seat. I typically travel with a rectangular backpack (plus, if needed, a check in, which I acknowledge may not make it there). It gives one an independence and self sufficiency that's completely worth it.
Still there are plenty of medicine you don’t want to miss for a few days. For me and my family anything that we absolutely need travels in hand luggage always. In my experience getting a lost bag can be a huge pain specially if it was lost during a layover
This is really harsh but it’s good advice. I’ve never checked important medicine but I never really thought about the danger of losing access to it in a random city. Fortunately I think local pharmacies would be pretty understanding in this situation… and give people temporary access to missing medicine… hopefully… perhaps the airport could even act as a middleman (I got urgent care drugs at a foreign airport once when I was sick).
Pharmacies cannot and will not do that (except for insulin, for which it's now allowed in some states, and maybe a few other non-abusable things.) If it's a controlled substance -- which includes most things you'd be worried about withdrawal from -- forget it. If it's a more tightly scheduled drug, you'll have trouble even getting an unfamiliar doctor to prescribe it. It's not that they don't care about your withdrawal syndrome, but they generally care much more about not losing their license.
I think it would be a matter of calling the prescribing doctor’s office, explaining the situation and giving them the details of the pharmacy you’d like to pick up the prescription from. The biggest hurdle would probably be insurance, who doesn’t want to pay for more medicine than was necessary.
Good luck with that Dec 24-26 (the time frame we're discussing). You might get an answering service that can get a message through to your doctor but the office is likely to be closed and empty. Then you still have to find an open pharmacy with your medicine in stock.
I don’t know that pharmacies are allowed to do that. What you usually have to do is call your primary care or other doctor and explain the situation and have them send a prescription to the new city
This is why corporations can't be allowed to just do whatever they want. A rental company renting non-existent cars to you is a breach of their business purpose, to sell a product or service. You've spent time and money to get nothing, against what you were sold.
Who can step in to make some baseline rules that corporations have to abide by so people aren't screwed like this?
You could find flights earlier for around $750 to some destinations via private jet charter (subscription) company some friends did that while having similar problems.
No excuse, none? Not even the harried passengers at the terminal suddenly being told they need to check their carry-ons due to lack of overhead bin space, right before they're about to board?
You have never forgotten to pack something, or perhaps forgotten an important detail in a stressful situation?
I had an international flight every month on average in 2022, across Europe, and I was never explicitly informed about this by airline or any of the friends and coworkers.
Here are some crazy things I have encountered.
Rental cars in our city are sold out. Same for cities within two hours drive. The websites will accept reservations, but when you show up, they tell you they have no cars. Because it's the holidays, busses and trains are booked and any flights on other airlines are crazy expensive ($1500 one way). When you are stuck in a city, you are probably truly stuck there.
Your only hope of dealing with SWA is waiting in line at check-in or a gate. The phones don't work. Online chat doesn't work. The lines are long and slow.
Luggage is hit or miss. If your bag was pulled off a plane, you might find it in baggage claim, but most bags are on a plane or on the tarmac. SWA told us it may be 30 days until we get our luggage. They won't pull bags for people, and the agents that we spoke with acknowledged and felt for people who may have had medicine in them.
The workers are as befuddled as the passengers. They have been very nice and as helpful as they can be, but their phones haven't been working and their computer systems have been slow.
On Twitter, someone posted a video of the announcement at Houston Hobby about no flights until the 31st and people keeping their receipts for hotels, etc. They said the same thing at our airport.
People in the airport are so mad. It's unfortunate because it's not constructive. But tempers are flaring, and frustrated passengers who finally get to talk to an agent end up slowing things down because they spend a lot of time trying to hear something they're not going to hear.
Ultimately, this is an operations failure. Companies talk a lot about accountability, but the typical way you hold people accountable is by replacing them with more capable people. It will be very interesting to see if any executives leave SWA over this. If not, I would say that no one was held accountable.
To close, my family and I are fine. This is but a minor speed bump in life. No one is dying, and we will see how SWA takes care of the extra expenditures. Some people aren't so lucky. They have meds in bags, or finances that don't allow them to spend multiple nights in a hotel and get Uber trips for a few days. Hopefully, SWA takes care of them, too.