Monthly Archives for December 2022.
It’s not clear how many people appear in ‘Safety at Scale’ but the meaning here suggests scale in a couple of key scenes, using people to do things like form the American Airlines logo and a no smoking sign, and to suggest just how large American Airlines is.
This new video isn’t as chic as the last one. Still, it’s visually interesting.
There are likely over one million passengers whose flights were cancelled by Southwest Airlines over the holidays. Airline phone systems, and customer service lines at the airport, weren’t made for this.
Lines have been interminable. And that’s true even for passengers whose flights are on time, or at least haven’t been cancelled. Most people are paying for service from their airline with their time. One ingenious mom in Atlanta decided to pay to cut the check-in line with money instead.
Back in the early fall Alaska Airlines committed to introducing a new, simplified award chart by the end of the year. They’ve done that and it’s… not helpful. Alaska gives us less information, not more, and hides some devaluations in the mix.
Southwest has said they’ll cover reasonable expenses for affected travelers. That likely covers modest meals and hotel accommodations. But what about immodest expenses? For those, Larry Flynt’s Hustler Club has Southwest passengers covered.
Southwest’s IT systems lag other airlines. Their phone systems can’t handle the load. And recovery from a situation where crew are out of place, where the airline doesn’t always even know where crew are, and where flight schedules and staffing have to be rebuilt manually is not only nearly impossible – it’s made harder by operational know-how with a hole in it coming out of the pandemic.
Add on that a lot of people were paid to retire early in 2020. Southwest hired about 16,000 people in 2022. Nearly 20% of their workforce is brand new this year. A lot of that is flight attendants, and other front line employees. But it’s ops people too.
Now that China is re-opening to travel starting January 8, the U.S. is is imposing testing requirements on arrivals from China, Hong Kong and Macau – effective January 5.
Note that travel and testing requirements have done nothing to protect the U.S. in the first three years of the pandemic. They were didn’t keep out Covid, its surgest, or its variants.
Police threatened to arrest stranded Southwest Airlines passengers if they didn’t leave the gate area. In the video, the officer incorrectly claims that since their flight was cancelled they have no ticket and are therefore “trespassing.” “If your ticket was cancelled, you no longer have a ticket. You understand that, right?”
According to the officer, “Southwest is calling us” so they’re responding to the airline calling the police on their customers. I certainly feel for the overwhelmed employees, but that’s a bad look.
Denied boarding compensation is a cooperation game. As long as everyone sticks together, the total compensation amount will be higher. But as the compensation offer goes up the incentive for a given passenger to defect gets greater and greater.
TV writer Mike Drucker observed this in action, and watched passengers in New York stick together, as the airline’s offer went up and up.
But Aeroflot is struggling, perhaps nowhere made more obvious than the airline’s CEO fighting for what few scraps of travel are left – blaming Emirates and Turkish Airlines for its woes, and begging the Russian government to make life harder for those airlines so that passengers have no choice but to fly Aeroflot.
Southwest Airlines has faced an operational disaster of unprecedented proportions, cancelling over 60% of its flights every day and continuing to do so. They are likely displacing a quarter million passengers per day and doing so for about a week.
The Southwest Airlines CEO has broken his silence. There’s now a page on their website committing to reimburse passenger expenses. And there are hints at what really went wrong.
Gary Leff is one of the foremost experts in the field of miles, points, and frequent business travel -- a topic he has covered since 2002.
Co-founder of frequent flyer community InsideFlyer.com, emcee of the Freddie Awards, and named one of the "World's Top Travel Experts" by Conde' Nast Traveler (2010-Present) Gary has been a guest on most major news media, profiled in several top print publications, and published broadly on the topic of consumer loyalty. More About Gary »
