PSA from a SWA employee since the company won’t give any info : SouthwestAirlines

Southwest has always been a better experience for me than legacy airlines.

Wonder if anything will come of this

SURELY this will be the end of lax financial regulation in the American aviation industry!

To save you the time of clicking back to the earlier archive.org snapshots:

On behalf of all employees: WE ARE SORRY! I will give it to you straight- this meltdown was caused entirely by Southwest. It was triggered by the storm, but the failure to recover quickly is on Southwest 100%. If you are still hearing “weather” almost a week after the storm, it’s not true.

Couple main points:

Please be patient with us. We desperately want to do everything we can to get you where you’re going.

This shitstorm is because the crew scheduling software went belly up and it almost all has to be unraveled over the phone with crew members calling scheduling. If we had better technology which eliminated the need for phone calls, this would have been fixed by now.

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.

Like I said, it’s gonna take at least a week to get back to normal operations for Southwest.

If anyone has questions, I will try to answer them. I work ground ops at one of SWA’s hubs.

EDIT FOR FAQs—— 1. Checked bags are currently a disaster. Plan to not see your checked luggage for at least a month. In the interest of 100% transparency, some bags will be 30+ days lost in the system. 2. Will my flight for X date go out? Next 3 days- plan on a cancellation. 4-7 days- likely to go as scheduled. 7+ days- should see operational recovery.