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I am affected by this. We got halfway into our flight only to find our next leg was cancelled. SWA will not (cannot?) rebook anyone until the 31st. Our return f
by hrunt 4y ago
I am affected by this. We got halfway into our flight only to find our next leg was cancelled. SWA will not (cannot?) rebook anyone until the 31st. Our return flight was going to be Sunday, so we rebooked from our halfway stop back home on Sunday.
Here are some crazy things I have encountered.
Rental cars in our city are sold out. Same for cities within two hours drive. The websites will accept reservations, but when you show up, they tell you they have no cars. Because it's the holidays, busses and trains are booked and any flights on other airlines are crazy expensive ($1500 one way). When you are stuck in a city, you are probably truly stuck there.
Your only hope of dealing with SWA is waiting in line at check-in or a gate. The phones don't work. Online chat doesn't work. The lines are long and slow.
Luggage is hit or miss. If your bag was pulled off a plane, you might find it in baggage claim, but most bags are on a plane or on the tarmac. SWA told us it may be 30 days until we get our luggage. They won't pull bags for people, and the agents that we spoke with acknowledged and felt for people who may have had medicine in them.
The workers are as befuddled as the passengers. They have been very nice and as helpful as they can be, but their phones haven't been working and their computer systems have been slow.
On Twitter, someone posted a video of the announcement at Houston Hobby about no flights until the 31st and people keeping their receipts for hotels, etc. They said the same thing at our airport.
People in the airport are so mad. It's unfortunate because it's not constructive. But tempers are flaring, and frustrated passengers who finally get to talk to an agent end up slowing things down because they spend a lot of time trying to hear something they're not going to hear.
Ultimately, this is an operations failure. Companies talk a lot about accountability, but the typical way you hold people accountable is by replacing them with more capable people. It will be very interesting to see if any executives leave SWA over this. If not, I would say that no one was held accountable.
To close, my family and I are fine. This is but a minor speed bump in life. No one is dying, and we will see how SWA takes care of the extra expenditures. Some people aren't so lucky. They have meds in bags, or finances that don't allow them to spend multiple nights in a hotel and get Uber trips for a few days. Hopefully, SWA takes care of them, too.
- imchillyb 4y agoEvery airline, pre-boarding, informs passengers to place any and all necessary medication in their carry on bag. This has been procedure for the last 40 years. There is no excuse that is feasable or plausible for 'forgetting' important medications in the checked baggage. This is a reading comprehension problem and not an airline issue.
- elAhmo 4y agoI had an international flight every month on average in 2022, across Europe, and I was never explicitly informed about this by airline or any of the friends and coworkers.
- culopatin 4y agoNot to agree on blaming the victim like op, but they announce it over the PA system on many airports, not directly to each person.
- HDThoreaun 4y agoI’ve never heard this flying hundreds of times
- 3-cheese-sundae 4y agoNo excuse, none? Not even the harried passengers at the terminal suddenly being told they need to check their carry-ons due to lack of overhead bin space, right before they're about to board? You have never forgotten to pack something, or perhaps forgotten an important detail in a stressful situation?
- TomVDB 4y agoI have a million miles on United alone, and many more on others as well: I’ve never once heard such a message either.
- skrtskrt 4y agothey force you to check your carry ons half the time
- slater- 4y agohave you checked to make sure you're not just stuck in the plot of a Home Alone movie?
- codazoda 4y agoIf there are no cars available near you, and you want to drive, try U-Haul or similar truck rental places. It’s probably not going to be a super comfortable ride, but you might get home.
- peteradio 4y agoOr keep an eye out for shower-curtain-ring salesmen.
- lvspiff 4y agoOr a polka band
- hrunt 4y agoThat's a good idea, but not really feasible for a family. After the rental car fell through, we resigned ourselves to not getting to our destination and decided to make the most of the situation we have (explore a new city we have never experienced beyond an airport or a highway) and solidified our return flight.
- abeyer 4y agoA cheap mattress, pile of blankets, and a 12v tv all in the back of a truck made for the best road trips as a kid.
- tech-historian 4y agoSounds nostalgic and all, but the temp was near 0 in many places throughout the US. Not a fun time to be sleeping in the back of a U-Haul truck.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- fragmede 4y agothe other 3 (expensive) hacks I can think of are charter a flight, and draft people stuck in the same situation to help defray costs, rent a 15-passenger van or bus to do it; buy any vehicle you can find and then resell it at the other end
- jupp0r 4y agoAnybody who puts important meds into checked luggage is really to blame for their problems. Bags get lost even when airlines don't have catastrophic breakdowns of their normal operations and taking this risk is really not necessary as meds can totally be carried in carry-on. It's really unfortunate that this is causing problems for people but it's totally preventable.
- Digory 4y agoThe expected downside of a lost bag is that you get it back in a day or two — not ten days. And usually not in a city other than your point of departure or expected arrival. Southwest should be responsible for making it worse.
- google234123 4y agoThe expected downside of a lost bag is a lost bag.
- coffeebeqn 4y agoStill there are plenty of medicine you don’t want to miss for a few days. For me and my family anything that we absolutely need travels in hand luggage always. In my experience getting a lost bag can be a huge pain specially if it was lost during a layover
- jquery 4y agoThis is really harsh but it’s good advice. I’ve never checked important medicine but I never really thought about the danger of losing access to it in a random city. Fortunately I think local pharmacies would be pretty understanding in this situation… and give people temporary access to missing medicine… hopefully… perhaps the airport could even act as a middleman (I got urgent care drugs at a foreign airport once when I was sick).
- coffeebeqn 4y agoI don’t know that pharmacies are allowed to do that. What you usually have to do is call your primary care or other doctor and explain the situation and have them send a prescription to the new city
- el_benhameen 4y agoThanks for the update. I’m sure the people around you appreciate the calm you’re demonstrating. I hope you’re able to salvage some of your holiday plans.
- bombcar 4y agoFor those in a situation you may want to consider renting a truck from Uhaul or similar. They’re only open during business hours and will be way more expensive but a vehicle is a vehicle. I can’t say I recommend then offering to shove everyone else in the back. This has been one of the reasons I heavily lean toward direct flights now - that way if stranded im either at home or my destination.
- whalesalad 4y agoThere used to be a website where you could post that you were driving from A to B and other people could opt in to go with you and hitch a seat. That would be great for stuff like this. There’s also greyhound and Amtrak.
- Fatnino 4y agoFriend of mine used something like this to get from LA to the bay area. The car had 2 girls in it who hotboxed the car the entire 6 hour drive, then missed his exit near San Jose and got pulled over for an unrelated reason. Says if he wasn't married now he would do it again in a heartbeat.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- pdntspa 4y agoI used something like this to get from Berlin to Amsterdam. I wasn't hotboxed but did get to spend the ride chatting with an attractive fashion student. It was cool because I'm not involved in fashion at all but my uni was using that industry for a lot of examples in lessons.
- derwiki 4y agoI think the precursor to Lyft, Zimride, was a matching service like you describe.
- stevenwoo 4y ago
- midoridensha 4y agoI am SO glad I decided against traveling this holiday season. What a disaster.
- christophilus 4y agoI had a similar situation happen to me on my way back from a wedding. Got stuck in Charlotte with two small kids. It made me realize a bit more tangibly how absolutely terrible our public transportation is here in the US.
- latch 4y agoI don't know the cause of your specific situation. But with respect to 5400 cancelled flights, I'd be surprised to hear that there's a transportation system (public + private combined) that can handle a sudden and unexpected influx at a time where things are already at peak-capacity (holidays)
- Fezzik 4y agoMe thinks you are quite right: back of the napkin math indicates the average flight carries 64.44 passengers. So just the Southwest flight cancellations stranded 347,976 passengers. That’s a lot of people to re-route.
- nanidin 4y agoSouthwest boards three groups of up to 60 passengers each. Every Southwest flight I have taken post-pandemic has been full. I’d bump that average up to the 120-180 range for Southwest flights this time of year.
- danaris 4y agoYeah, but they're not all in one place. If the US had a genuinely functional public transport system, I doubt there would be much problem finding seats for all or the vast majority of the stranded people on trains going to or near their destinations.
- telotortium 4y agoThere's 2 types of public transport: intra-city and inter-city. Intra-city doesn't serve the same use case as flying, and can't generally be repurposed to inter-city transport, so it should be discounted. If the US had inter-city rail that people actually used, then it would almost certainly be near capacity in a normal holiday season. Unless you assume there are a lot of extra train cars that aren't normally being used but could be taken out of storage, there's no way that it could absorb such a large influx of stranded passengers on short notice. Inter-city rail generally operates like airplanes in that only one ticket can be sold for each seat - there's no standing room on a multi-hour train ride.
- vishnugupta 4y agoApparently it’s due to SWA scheduling and related software overwhelmed and unable to handle the information mismatch. https://twitter.com/flyingtigress/status/1607739070687371268 https://twitter.com/flyingtigress/status/1607739070687371268
- neycoda 4y agoThis is why corporations can't be allowed to just do whatever they want. A rental company renting non-existent cars to you is a breach of their business purpose, to sell a product or service. You've spent time and money to get nothing, against what you were sold. Who can step in to make some baseline rules that corporations have to abide by so people aren't screwed like this?
- wdb 4y agoYou could find flights earlier for around $750 to some destinations via private jet charter (subscription) company some friends did that while having similar problems.
- tedmiston 4y ago> They won't pull bags for people, and the agents that we spoke with acknowledged and felt for people who may have had medicine in them. Casual reminder to keep all medicine in your carry-on! Even gate-checked bags get delayed and lost. I never realized that could happen with a gate-check until it happened to me. They loaded all of the gate-checked bags onto our plane, but then that put it over a weight limit, so they took a pallet or two of them off and put them on another flight. Of course, it was a complicated multi-leg international flight to boot.