There's an unsubstantiated rumor that 120 Southwest ramp agents walked off the job at Denver International Airport after the VP of operations out of Dallas sent a demanding (and possibly unreasonable) memo to the Denver staff banning sick time without a doctors note and requiring mandatory overtime.
> after the VP of operations out of Dallas sent a demanding (and possibly unreasonable) memo to the Denver staff banning sick time without a doctors note and requiring mandatory overtime
IANAL but that’s not just unreasonable, it’s downright illegal according to Colorado labor laws. Southwest can only ask their employees for a doctor’s note after four consecutive days of absence and that’s according to a post-COVID law.
I’m not sure about the mandatory overtime but that’s probably governed by a union contract (4/5ths of SW is unionized). Evidence shows that this ~moron~ VP didn’t know the specifics of the former so he probably fucked up the latter too.
I’m guessing Denver employees aren’t the only ones to walk out. Union solidarity, baby!
I wouldn’t doubt this, although a friend stuck at Denver yesterday told me he ran into a Southwest employee who couldn’t figure out where he was supposed to be for hours. WSJ mentioned it could be due to their call-in scheduling system being totally overwhelmed.
Currently at another airport waiting to fly into DFW, and this is the current word among the airport crew as well: that Southwest is uniquely impacted right now because a bunch of the Southwest staff at Dallas just quit.
I don’t know about majority. Looking at pilot forums their scheduling system seems to be in complete disarray. Hours long wait times to get through on the phone, no awareness of where crews are even located.
Oof. At the very least, any employer requiring a doctor’s note should pay for it. Getting in to see a doctor on short notice can be difficult and expensive.
That memo appears to be issued as a result of all the flight problems. And it says it's a temporary emergency policy due to the current trouble they are having.
> If you've been left in the lurch and your efforts to reach a customer service agent are going nowhere, the founder of Scott's Cheap Flights suggests trying an international number.
> "The main hotline for US airlines will be clogged with other passengers getting rebooked. To get through to an agent quickly, call any one of the airline's dozens of international offices" Scott Keyes said.
> "Agents can handle your reservation just like US-based ones can, but there's virtually no wait to get through."
this is good advice, let me extrapolate to a simpler heuristic.
When landing at an airport when you know several connections are lost due to local issue with your airline, always get on the phone as soon as you get out of the aircraft. certainly call before heading to the kiosk and lining up for the lone agent to support you
Because, by the time the sole agent gets to listen to your issue, the next flight will be fully booked, and your hopes of getting out quickly will be gone.
> If you are able to find alternative transportation to your final destination- DO IT. Another airline, bus, train, Lyft, rental car, ANYTHING. Southwest WILL NOT be able to get you to your destination anytime in the next few days.
I don't work for Southwest, but, I have friends that do.
The situation is kind of amplified by the fact that they are now doing crew scheduling by hand -- their crew scheduling system went offline at some point during this fiasco -- and because they aren't a hub and spoke style of airline, they don't have flight attendants at their hubs...so, what's happening is that flight attendants are scheduled for a "leg" of a trip, from Altoona to Boston to Columbus to Dallas to Edison. This flight attendant will be on that plane from Altoona until they wrap up in Edison. Because of this interruption, they cancel the flight from Altoona to Boston. Now, they need to find a plane (and a crew) in Boston to fly the leg from Boston to Columbus...cascading failures throughout their system. Add in phone system failures, a winter storm, and the busiest travel week of the year, and you've got what Southwest has right now.
You have crew timing out, crews that are abandoned at stations, and some folks telling people to not expect their luggage for 30+ days. Southwest has also been delaying negotiating with their ground crew (it's been three+ years since they've had a contract), so, I'm almost certain that when they got the Denver "Operational Emergency" email on the 21st, most of them said screw it and quit: every other airline has struggled to hire experienced folks and my guess is that it won't be long until they're re-employed somewhere else
They've cancelled most flights until Friday, with the exception being flight for aircraft staging, and will struggle to find open seats for their flight attendants to ride on other airlines (even if they are flying space-positive) just so they can have crew at locations for flights.
This does not sound unique to Southwest, I imagine all airlines have to do this to get people staged in the right places. Which means our air travel system is basically a just-in-time system and as we've learned JIT systems break quickly when there are shortages. Software problems and a lack of schedulers may be contributing to this event, but it seems like it could happen to any airline and is something of an infrastructure weakness in global transport. In fact, airlines might sometimes book flights for pilots and attendents on competitors planes, which may mean the lack of flights by Southwest could affect other airlines placement of personnel, so there may be some contagion risk.
Extreme nitpick on my part: Southwest isn't actually a legacy carrier: they were one of the first "low-cost" carriers to begin interstate travel after the airlines were deregulated in 1978. The only remaining legacy carriers in the US are Delta, American, United, Hawaiian, and Alaska.
It sounds reasonable but I’m surprised that it’s not “cost efficient” to have a few sore planes and crews strategically located around the USA - you’d only need three or four to be able to respond within hours to any scheduling mishap. Margins must be quite low.
Ryanair in Europe pretty much operates the same with many small hubs and point-to-point flights, but for some reason they are also run objectively a very reliable operation. Wonder why that is.
That period also included a massive expansion of Southwest’s footprint— something like 18 cities. I fly a lot and never had much trouble with them until this last week. United and American have been far worse for me in terms of delays and cancellations, not to mention their disgruntled staffs.
I've flown Southwest dozens of times. While I like their lower costs it's pretty easy to see where they are cutting costs with operations. In "normal" conditions their cost cutting is just functional. In any sort of exceptional situation their entire system fall apart.
This one affected a lot of people traveling to the 2021 US Grand Prix in Austin & it supposedly didn't affect Southwest [my Alaska flight was cancelled after four hours of "any minute now"]:
I have a Southwest flight on Friday I am now very nervous about. For the first time ever I bought a fully refundable flight as a backup option through American Airlines. Looks like Southwest might allow free cancellations too so I might ditch that flight entirely to avoid undue travel headaches. Either way, I don’t ever remember a worst traveling season than this.
The right credit card, if you have one or can get one, usually includes "insurance" for travel delays, lost luggage, cancellations etc. I always forget about the benefits other than "points" but there are some great ones.
Recently, I was glad I used the right card to book an airbnb which we had to cancel day of check-in. Full refund on a non-refundable airbnb.
Southwest has always allowed free cancellations, up to 10 minutes before boarding— that was one of its main selling points. You (normally) get the money as flight credit, however.
Was just at the airport. Waited 2.5 hours in line to be told that ticketing will show up tomorrow at 7 am. Then went home and was on hold for 4 hours. You are lucky if you call and don't get a busy tone.
But my story isn't bad. Hearing other people's story at the airport in line was shocking. Family with kids stuck in connections for days. No hotels, little food, crowded lines. Bags? Somewhere in the country.
I’m seriously wondering about Southwest’s software systems at the moment. I was traveling with a youth sports team on American early this month. We had a flight cancellation that resulted in about 30 people needing to find new flights. You just popped open the app or website and were given multiple options to rebook.
My brother had a flight canceled on southwest Thursday night. It was completely impossible to rebook or even cancel on their website at that point. The phone and physical lines were impossible, so we just booked a new flight for the following day in order to get him home for Christmas, it wasn’t even much more than his original flight. The next day his original reservation was “automatically rebooked” on a flight for Christmas morning. He kept the new booking and didn’t cancel the rebooked leg till he was wheels up. Craziest thing was the flight wasn’t full. He got an entire row to himself.
The fact that southwest doesn’t seem to have the ability to let customers self rebook in situations like this seems to be a major IT/software failing.
Southwest tries to send more flights per day by reducing time at the gate. Most of the time it’s great, since it means cheaper flights and less time as a passenger waiting around for folks to find their seat number. They have lots of hubs, so it’s easy to find a flight that fits your needs.
But when things go wrong en masse, error propagates through the system fast. It’s the same failure mode as just-in-time manufacturing. There just aren’t gaps in the schedule for lots of things to go wrong, nor extra planes to pick up the slack. I’d recommend Southwest still, but not if your schedule is tight and the flight is can’t-miss.
I suspect there are some other problems in their tech stack and personnel they have to sort out too.
I was impacted by this. I had three flights canceled in four days. My bags are still somewhere in Denver. I ended up rebooking on American. I'm certainly going to try to make Southwest pay for it, once their phone lines clear up.
Southwest is going to need to go above and beyond to fix this or they're done in my book. I will choose a more expensive option over them. I'll choose a less direct route. This Russian Roulette but every chamber's loaded game has been an enormous, stressful waste of time.
None of the hacks suggested here work when the customer service phone line is down, the website doesn't work, and every other flight is cancelled or full.
Slight tangent on this and something I've always wondered: if something as basic yet extremely crucial as scheduling software is outdated (SWA might very well be on a mainframe or transmitting CSV files in an FTP server and that server could've acted up), how on earth are they expected to scale and adopt new tech? It seems like a ticking time bomb and gross mismanagement.
Fortunately I'm not flying this week, but I've already seen and experienced numerous meltdowns from SWA in the past. If this doesn't signal a wake-up call to invest in tech infrastructure for any company I don't know what else will.
There are a multitude of different ways to bridge from mainframe (IBM Websphere MQ/Host integration server) systems or to make file based systems look mostly online (small, frequent batch files). So technically it is possible and done pretty reliablly for banks and the like.
Extending use cases to cover behaviours that were not covered by the original software is where things get exciting. You will end up with a hodge podge of systems & processes that try to implement multi-step work flows and deal with failures through manual or equally complex automated methods to compensate.
Generally most industries are pretty terrible at evolving the solutions they have or completely replacing them. So you will see a multi-generational set of systems that are in place to provide an acceptably current set of behaviours.
This situation can arise due to varying commercial pressures, however Developer and Engineer's inability to communicate what the system currently does and what is easy and hard to change in no small way contributes to following paths that result in poor system outcomes over the lifetimeof systems.
Southwest is one of the few airlines that has non-stops from AUS and Chicago and Kansas City, so I fly them almost exclusively. In general, I'm always impressed with how well everything is run, and how professional and friendly their crew are.
[+] [-] m348e912|3 years ago|reply
https://twitter.com/AtSouthwest/status/1606543397996855296
If true, it could account for a majority of SW's cancellations over the past few days and it could continue for the foreseeable future.
[+] [-] akiselev|3 years ago|reply
IANAL but that’s not just unreasonable, it’s downright illegal according to Colorado labor laws. Southwest can only ask their employees for a doctor’s note after four consecutive days of absence and that’s according to a post-COVID law.
I’m not sure about the mandatory overtime but that’s probably governed by a union contract (4/5ths of SW is unionized). Evidence shows that this ~moron~ VP didn’t know the specifics of the former so he probably fucked up the latter too.
I’m guessing Denver employees aren’t the only ones to walk out. Union solidarity, baby!
[+] [-] miguelazo|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AdmiralAsshat|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] m-ee|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rhcom2|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cokeandpepsi|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] amluto|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ars|3 years ago|reply
That memo appears to be issued as a result of all the flight problems. And it says it's a temporary emergency policy due to the current trouble they are having.
[+] [-] tareqak|3 years ago|reply
> If you've been left in the lurch and your efforts to reach a customer service agent are going nowhere, the founder of Scott's Cheap Flights suggests trying an international number.
> "The main hotline for US airlines will be clogged with other passengers getting rebooked. To get through to an agent quickly, call any one of the airline's dozens of international offices" Scott Keyes said.
> "Agents can handle your reservation just like US-based ones can, but there's virtually no wait to get through."
[+] [-] IG_Semmelweiss|3 years ago|reply
When landing at an airport when you know several connections are lost due to local issue with your airline, always get on the phone as soon as you get out of the aircraft. certainly call before heading to the kiosk and lining up for the lone agent to support you
Because, by the time the sole agent gets to listen to your issue, the next flight will be fully booked, and your hopes of getting out quickly will be gone.
[+] [-] ggm|3 years ago|reply
(From another HN posting at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34145303)
[+] [-] lucb1e|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Sakos|3 years ago|reply
That's damning.
[+] [-] itsdrewmiller|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] imroot|3 years ago|reply
The situation is kind of amplified by the fact that they are now doing crew scheduling by hand -- their crew scheduling system went offline at some point during this fiasco -- and because they aren't a hub and spoke style of airline, they don't have flight attendants at their hubs...so, what's happening is that flight attendants are scheduled for a "leg" of a trip, from Altoona to Boston to Columbus to Dallas to Edison. This flight attendant will be on that plane from Altoona until they wrap up in Edison. Because of this interruption, they cancel the flight from Altoona to Boston. Now, they need to find a plane (and a crew) in Boston to fly the leg from Boston to Columbus...cascading failures throughout their system. Add in phone system failures, a winter storm, and the busiest travel week of the year, and you've got what Southwest has right now.
You have crew timing out, crews that are abandoned at stations, and some folks telling people to not expect their luggage for 30+ days. Southwest has also been delaying negotiating with their ground crew (it's been three+ years since they've had a contract), so, I'm almost certain that when they got the Denver "Operational Emergency" email on the 21st, most of them said screw it and quit: every other airline has struggled to hire experienced folks and my guess is that it won't be long until they're re-employed somewhere else
They've cancelled most flights until Friday, with the exception being flight for aircraft staging, and will struggle to find open seats for their flight attendants to ride on other airlines (even if they are flying space-positive) just so they can have crew at locations for flights.
[+] [-] rapjr9|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ipython|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] woodruffw|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bombcar|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] markus92|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rhaway84773|3 years ago|reply
Even if it’s out of their control (many of the issues were within their control), it seems Southwest fails way worse than every other US airline.
[+] [-] miguelazo|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] giantrobot|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] morganw|3 years ago|reply
https://www.usatoday.com/story/travel/airline-news/2021/10/2...
[+] [-] verdenti|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] samename|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] harrisonjackson|3 years ago|reply
Recently, I was glad I used the right card to book an airbnb which we had to cancel day of check-in. Full refund on a non-refundable airbnb.
[+] [-] miguelazo|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TedDoesntTalk|3 years ago|reply
Even during COVID?
[+] [-] cjekel|3 years ago|reply
But my story isn't bad. Hearing other people's story at the airport in line was shocking. Family with kids stuck in connections for days. No hotels, little food, crowded lines. Bags? Somewhere in the country.
[+] [-] atdrummond|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] topkai22|3 years ago|reply
My brother had a flight canceled on southwest Thursday night. It was completely impossible to rebook or even cancel on their website at that point. The phone and physical lines were impossible, so we just booked a new flight for the following day in order to get him home for Christmas, it wasn’t even much more than his original flight. The next day his original reservation was “automatically rebooked” on a flight for Christmas morning. He kept the new booking and didn’t cancel the rebooked leg till he was wheels up. Craziest thing was the flight wasn’t full. He got an entire row to himself.
The fact that southwest doesn’t seem to have the ability to let customers self rebook in situations like this seems to be a major IT/software failing.
[+] [-] neilv|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] labster|3 years ago|reply
But when things go wrong en masse, error propagates through the system fast. It’s the same failure mode as just-in-time manufacturing. There just aren’t gaps in the schedule for lots of things to go wrong, nor extra planes to pick up the slack. I’d recommend Southwest still, but not if your schedule is tight and the flight is can’t-miss.
I suspect there are some other problems in their tech stack and personnel they have to sort out too.
[+] [-] ivraatiems|3 years ago|reply
Southwest is going to need to go above and beyond to fix this or they're done in my book. I will choose a more expensive option over them. I'll choose a less direct route. This Russian Roulette but every chamber's loaded game has been an enormous, stressful waste of time.
None of the hacks suggested here work when the customer service phone line is down, the website doesn't work, and every other flight is cancelled or full.
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] cjekel|3 years ago|reply
What would it take for southwest to remedy the station for you?
I know it's hard to say. You may never get your bags.
I'm basically valuing any future southwest credit as $0. All of my air miles at $0 too :(
[+] [-] acwan93|3 years ago|reply
Fortunately I'm not flying this week, but I've already seen and experienced numerous meltdowns from SWA in the past. If this doesn't signal a wake-up call to invest in tech infrastructure for any company I don't know what else will.
[+] [-] Throw10987|3 years ago|reply
Extending use cases to cover behaviours that were not covered by the original software is where things get exciting. You will end up with a hodge podge of systems & processes that try to implement multi-step work flows and deal with failures through manual or equally complex automated methods to compensate.
Generally most industries are pretty terrible at evolving the solutions they have or completely replacing them. So you will see a multi-generational set of systems that are in place to provide an acceptably current set of behaviours.
This situation can arise due to varying commercial pressures, however Developer and Engineer's inability to communicate what the system currently does and what is easy and hard to change in no small way contributes to following paths that result in poor system outcomes over the lifetimeof systems.
[+] [-] etchalon|3 years ago|reply