Comments

1. There are some really nice folks that work at AUS, but this airport can’t do anything right. Though, to be fair, I was on the 05:30 to MIA this morning and it was smooth sailing all around. Meltdown must have come later.

2. Where’s the DOT when you need them? You wouldn’t see this stuff in a regular 3rd-world country, say Indonesia or Egypt

3. I flew out Tuesday night, and while the airport was very busy, everything was moving. Southwest bag check line wasn’t more than 10 minutes long, and there were lots of people around to help direct. I even complimented one of the staff on how well they were handling it.

   Sorry to see it degenerated so badly today.

4. Even though it will cause more crowding in the terminal, it sounds like people with checked bags should show up five hours before their flight. By the time they get their bags checked, it should be only a few hours to flight time and a time to go through security and then relax from all of the stress. What a mess. Maybe something is breaking down in the computerized systems of Southwest.

5. Unless you absolutely need to be somewhere, don’t you say at some point screw this and leave? I would.

6. We got here 4 hours before our flight today with Southwest at AUS and didn’t make it. We are on standby with fingers crossed but southwest has been clear that they will not give us food vouchers or hotel vouchers or anything other than a reschedule. They, Southwest Customer Support, informed us that they had no idea that there would be this many people flying southwest out of Austin… which I wounder what the FAA thinks of that.

   Additionally talking to some workers at the gates, they told us 20 to 30 people are no shows to their flight due to this…

7. When you have time to spare…go by air.

8. AUS airport is simply awful. Great food can’t compensate for an awful terminal set up that was never designed to handle today’s traffic. There is no solution to making it better either.

9. Yet another meltdown by Southwest Airlines!

10. Southworst. You get to wait in line forever just to get on the plane with no assigned seat and obnoxious seat savers. Not worth it. I refuse to fly them. Why are people checking bags for a 2 day trip anyways? Carry on and a roll aboard is good enough for a trip of that duration.

11. I left AUS in Sunday. SW baggage conveyor as down and I had to schlep it to a staging point. Light travel time (3pm Sunday) so didn’t take long.

    Southwest sure has fallen a long way since prepandemic.

12. This is why I always get to the airport 5 hours early

13. Two rules for flying:

    1)Never check a bag.
    2)Never, ever, check a bag on Southwest.

14. Had 12 people at my place on Lake Erie in Ohio for an eclipse party (perfect weather and an amazing experience). Everyone flew out of DTW on 4 different airlines (DL, AA, F9 and NK) from both of DTW’s 2 terminals. No delays in terminal operations or checking in for anyone. But the common denominator was every one of us had a 1-2 hour delay for mechanical reasons.

    WN clearly wasn’t (and isn’t) staffed appropriately at AUS. My experience has been that the majority of service providing companies cut too deeply during COVID, and are paying the price for their inept and shortsighted management. And, in many instances, the cutting of experienced workers means that the remaining workers aren’t experienced enough to provide the efficiency needed post cut.

    But I am seeing a general decline in operational reliability across the airlines. I have flown about 20 flights this year (not a road warrior, but I’ve been retired since 2011), and about 90% of them have had mechanical delays or crew staffing delays of more than 1 hour. Clearly management failure for airlines generally, and no one is immune.

    What is needed is a U.S. analogue to EC261. But I’ll likely be long dead before anything like that happens.

    P.S. @Gary – let me know if you want photos.

15. Just take the drive to San Antonio

16. We got to experience this absolute nightmare today.

    I simply do not understand why Southwest bore the brunt of this when the other airlines seemed just fine. Some of the Twitter threads/comments make it apparent that part of the problem was a cascading series of failures: early arrivers for morning flights missed their flight from the already expanding line, but WEREN’T allowed to drop their bags at that time for the later flight they were rescheduled to… so they had to re-enter the morass and try again, and miss again.

    We had no idea it was this bad, and arrived a cavalier 2 hours ahead of our flight… in that two hours, our flight got delayed a half hour, and we had only just gotten inside and through the first gauntlet.

    The line started all the way down the curb from the terminal, and then passed in front of the entirety of the terminal. Crowd control was doing a pretty good job of stationing themselves at any break-in points to prevent people from skipping ahead, but it was still absurd. And once you got INTO the terminal building, you were all the way to the extreme end of the building, in front of Jet Blue and Spirit: the interior Southwest line tripled back on itself at this point, then moved laterally a bit, then tripled back on itself again, and then finally crossed in front of the Southwest bag drop area and, you guessed it, tripled back on itself again.

    I swear I mapped it and it was roughly a half mile long line.

    I simply do not understand how this sort of systemic failure occurs when, functionally, the planes are there, the staff is there, and the airline knows exactly how many people are going to be there, and very accurately guesses how many will be dropping bags.

    And dropping people into a single line (before they broke it apart and added a “not yet missed your flight” line, but didn’t tell anyone in the back half, like us) with no rhyme or reason is just… bedlam.

    I have a couple of meetings I absolutely CANNOT miss Thurs/Fri, so I ended up racing ahead and ditching my wife, mother-in-law, and 7 and 3 year old to make the (perhaps 75% full) flight, just barely. I asked the gate agent why my wife should continue to stand in line, because at this point, it was probably an additional 90-120 minutes (we had been bumped to the “most close” line, but it was still a triple back line at this point, and that was with us skipping a WHOLE BUNCH of people who told us they had all already missed) and she said there wasn’t going to be anything they could do up front we couldn’t do from a hotel, so I told her to cut bait and uber to the airport hotel while there were still rooms.

    Absolutely insane. (From there, I had her book with cash a replacement flight—on Friday, since there were no routes to PHX available AT ALL on Thursday by this point—and once she got through to SWA on the phone, they refunded that back, shifted the original itinerary to that route instead, and told us they hadn’t received any guidance on make-goods, but to keep receipts for reimbursements, etc. so we’ll see what Southwest comes up with here, but meltdown is putting it lightly.)

17. It must be horrible living in the U.S.

18. @Ryan “It must be horrible living in the U.S.”

    The roads are paved with gold, but with many many bodies buried along the way.

    It becomes tolerable of you are wealthy.

19. Austin, TX & Southwest airlines both are entirely over rated. Don’t fly Southwest when there is an eclipse! Ha!

20. To be fair to Southwest, I have flown in and out of the Austin airport on Southwest for 40+ years. I live in the Austin area. I have never seen so many passengers at ABIA, not even after F1 – it was wall-to-wall people everywhere. We got through the TSA checkpoint just before this longer line formed. At the time, there were probably 100 people or more ahead of us and we got through the line stunningly quickly. The Southwest staff was working hard to move the line as quickly as possible, including having staff in the kiosk area to help tag bags and a staff member making sure passengers were moving without delay to the bag drop counter.

21. retired lawyer,
    the simple reality is that you have extraordinary bad luck; not a single airline comes close to having even half of their flights delayed by mechanicals.
    You either are big on hyperbole or you have an uncanny ability to get on the very few flights on any airline – less than 5% – that are delayed for mechanical reasons.

    There really is data on this stuff

22. Is this the effect of having “free bags”? I can do a 7-10 day trip without checking bags.

23. The airport was a total mess yesterday, because of Southwest airlines booking way too many flights at once. Travelers should have received communication from Southwest to arrive 5 hours early, but there was absolutely no communication. No one knew what was going on. Thousands of people missed their flights due to Southwest trying to make a buck. They shouldn’t have scheduled more flights than they could accommodate in such limited space. This was a total failure on Soutwest’s part. The airport staff (non Southwest workers) were so nice and apologetic, but when we finally got to the front of the line, after 4+ hours of waiting and missing our flight, the Southwest employee was incredibly rude and blamed the airport for their [Southwest’s] inability to schedule properly based on the space they have to work with. The airport has been the same size for years, they know how many flights/people they can accommodate, but they just saw dollar signs and didn’t care about how many people they were going to screw over and leave stranded. They refused to provide accommodations to those left stranded, so we’re all spending hundreds of extra dollars because of Southwest’s poor planning.

24. Southwest won’t let you check bags 5 hours before a flight.

25. I assume that SW sold very few tickets out of AUS the 24 hours prior (as a % of already sold). Thus, the volume should be no surprise. How are you not prepared for this?

26. As a business traveler, I was extremely disappointed with Southwest’s communication. They closed their priority line and Sky Cap. I arrived and waited over 4 hours to check my bag. If I had known, I would have shipped my bag from the Fed Ex in my hotel before going to the airport. I asked the Asst Station Manager why they closed the priority checkin line and I was told they want to treat all their passengers the same. WOW, my 17 flights this year, 57,000 miles and 8 more scheduled flights on them before the end of May, we are not equal. I will take my business elsewhere, spending over 40k a year and I missed 2 flights, if they had communicated I would have been fine. I can no longer be a champion of SWA. Our flight crew had no idea of the stress passengers had experienced, so they don’t even communicate with their staff. I took an Uber with a colleague and she breezed through American Airlines baggage check in 10 minutes.

27. Ever been FLL? This is a very common thing there. Every weekend is like this. The line for terminal 4 wraps around inside the building a dozen times before expanding to the street then past the terminal to other terminals. At times the line for T4 goes past T3! It’s so bad that the ticket counter line goes one direction outside of the building and the security line goes in a different direction on the other side of the building.

    Ah the ‘joys’ of air travel today….

28. @mmt, with the checked bag line being several hours to get through, getting in it five hours before flight time will work out as you won’t be able to check your bag until after it is ok per Southwest’s rules. In fact, in some cases getting in line six hours before flight time may have been the right call.

29. Submit your DOT complaint here https://secure.dot.gov/air-travel-complaint

30. You don’t think that the management at Southwest has taken tips from Harry Stonecypher’s book, “How To Screw Up A Great Engineering Firm” do you? Hmmm.

31. I like it . When this happens , I sail on through .

32. Southwest definitely missed the mark at AUS yesterday and the heartache was preventable if they had just communicated to their passengers. Airport employees reported that the lines were already out the door and wrapping around the front of the terminal by 11am. We arrived at 2pm for a 4pm flight and the line for bag-drop wrapped 3x across the entire front of the terminal and 3x inside across the terminal. We never check a bag, but this time we were going to be away for 2 weeks and had decided to check a bag of beach/snorkel gear/sunscreen / tripod for the eclipse, etc.

    Southwest had email and SMS contact information for all of their booked passengers departing from Austin and by 11am they should have been sending out emails and text messages that if you were checking a bag it was going to be a 4 or 5 hour wait in line (but make sure you don’t get to the front more than 4 hours before your flight or they would make you start over in the line- another ridiculous decision that contributed to the chaos).

    Had they communicated, most passengers could have come early or shipped their bags. After an hour and a half in the line, we had to make the decision to send my wife and 4yo and 9mo old through TSA by herself on our original direct flight (for fear of not being able to re-book 3 seats) and I booked the last seat online on a flight 1.5 hours later with a 30 minute connection in Atlanta. After 3 hours in the bag line with at least another hour to go, finally an airline employee started pulling people out of the line who hadn’t yet missed their flights and fast tracking them to the bag-tag machines and since I was 40 minutes before my flight they pulled me. Of course, I wasted more time waiting for a bag tag machine only to have it tell me I needed to proceed to the desk agent (likely because it was less than 60 minutes before my flight and too late to check a bag?) So back in the bag drop line and the desk agent tagged my bag and agreed that I had little chance of my bag arriving that night even if I made it to miami. Thankfully I had pre-check and got through the initial screen in about 15 more minutes but I must have picked the wrong line because in my line they were picking every other bag out of the scanner for the additional swab procedure and my bag was in a line behind 3 other bags and after the first 3 bags it was apparently time for shift change and the agent disappeared so I stood there for 5 minutes waiting for the next agent to arrive and inspect my bag (realizing that after all of the line waiting I might still miss the flight). The agent swabbed my laptop, iPad, DSLR (I had even pulled 3 of various electronics out of my carryon to send through the scanner separately so it would be less dense to avoid this).

    Finally they finished my bag and I sprinted 3 gates to arrive at the jet bridge door halfway closed and I saw the gate agent walking down the bridge to the plane. I called out to ask if I was too late, and thankfully she said she’s check me in but needed the count first.

    When I arrived in ATL, the connections app said my flight was supposed to take off in 15 minutes so it was another 7 gate sprint only to arrive at the gate and find that they hadn’t started boarding because the flight crew hadn’t landed yet from their previous flight (about 10 of 12 remaining flights out of ATL were marked as delayed at that time).

    Thankfully, my wife received lots of help from friendly employees and travelers as a “single mom” on her leg of the trip and the flight attendant and pilots on their flight gave my 4yo son the “best day ever” when they let him sit in the pilot’s seat in the cockpit while my wife was getting situated, and I made my two flights to be reunited with the family 4 hours after they arrived at an airport hotel (well after midnight) and I know that others had significantly worse experiences so I should consider us lucky, but this seems like something that could be avoided with operational changes and improved communication.

33. Where’s Pete Buttgag when we need him?

34. I live in Austin and happened to fly out Tuesday night during the storms from the South Terminal. There were 2 Frontier flights leaving at 9 and 11 p.m. The 1st flight had a small delay from the storm. Both flights made it just fine. The weather was NOT that bad. In fact we had to walk out to the plane ramp and there was no rain or lightening. Southwest
    passengers who had canceled flights Tuesday night should note this to the FAA.
    I never fly SW their seating system is a joke.

    I also saw the debacle 1st hand in December 2022 at Denver, Las Vegas and IAH where 1000’s of bags were left unclaimed because of computer issues at Southwest. I met a number of people who had been stranded for days desperately trying to get home. I was flying Delta thank goodness.

35. @ATX Always, lying about the weather is one of the favorite things to lie about by the airlines. The airlines do it to enrich their bottom line which not only helps their employees make their high wages but also helps their executives and helps to maintain their stock prices.

36. Southwest is a mess. I avoid them like a plague.

37. Do Southwest passengers check in more bags than most airlines? Is there airport data?

38. A friend was in the 6 hour baggage drop line at AUS. Of course he missed his flight.
    The ticket agent rebooked him the next day from SAN and explicitly told him that SWA would cover the rental car and hotel. Of course he also missed a day of work.

    Guess what, they are now denying promising any reimbursement. Instead, they offered a $100 flight credit. He appealed, and they again denied, and offered another $100 credit. He’s pursuing with DOT.

    This sounds like a winner for a class-action lawsuit; there were LOTS of victims.