Uh, every airline I know sells round trip tickets at least a day apart. A considerable portion of their business is short, business trips. It is unreasonable fo

Uh, every airline I know sells round trip tickets at least a day apart. A considerable portion of their business is short, business trips. It is unreasonable for a service to have an SLA that allows outages larger than the duration of the service. Sure weather is hard to predict but it is good enough to alert you the 3-4 hours before your flight so you would know prior to arriving at the airport. Computer systems can be made fully redundant, etc. I agree that it's pointless to expect customer service to handle the load during these crisis precisely because these events should either be one per decade type events or at least be handled in a planned, graceful manner. What would that look like? For every flight let customers at least check what the probability of delay/cancelation is - the airlines certainly have a number. When a flight is canceled; book first and business class on alternative airlines/flights. Let economy/other customer's select alternative flight or request refund via zero human/robocall interaction process. If more than 50% of the flight's capacity has already checked in then alternative lodging should be mandatory and meals should be provided. It's painfully obvious that the airlines know that as long as all of them provide terrible service then none of then will be expected too.