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Comment by cpeterso | Hacker News Reader

I flew Southwest yesterday (in California, not Florida). My flight was delayed 30 minutes, but I heard other Southwest flights at the same airport had been canceled.

This morning, Southwest sent me a customer satisfaction survey email with questions specific to flight delays. Seems like they are testing how much their brand was impacted by these problems, perhaps anticipating the delays will continue from worker action (that every denies)? If the problems truly were caused by some temporary issues that have been resolved, why would they bother surveying customers about it?

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What ratio of customers got survey requests in the year(s) leading up to yours? We need a baseline before we can determine whether or not your survey was initiated atypically.

The airline could send custom surveys based on your specific flight/seat. If you sit in first class, "How did you enjoy the first class experience?". If you ordered food, "Did you enjoy your meal?". If your flight is delayed, "Did the delay impact your plans?"

I think we both have zero evidence to back our claims so I wouldn't read too much into it.

> If the problems truly were caused by some temporary issues that have been resolved, why would they bother surveying customers about it?

Two reasons come to mind: 1) This weekend's delays might get sorted, but the underlying cause is still there. It's just not a pilot walkout, but an overall lack of resilience in their workforce and infrastructure.

2) The holiday season is coming. Southwest is already stretched thin and is probably trying to gauge what kind of reckoning is waiting for them if they have to cancel thousands of flights during the busiest travel period of the year (and one where snow delays are a real possibility for much of the country).

Because there are people at Southwest whose job is to do surveys, and they want it to look like they are contributing.

And surveys are just ubiquitous these days for every hopefully routine transaction because everyone wants to be able to be "data-driven." Which in principle is not a bad thing but there are so many of them that I pretty much ignore surveys at this point.

From experience, there is no way Southwest is fast enough to implement this check/extra data collection in 2 days.

I am getting survey requests from AA after each flight. It doesn't cost them much to send an email.

I don't think I can remember taking a flight in the last 5 years where I didn't receive a survey email during/after the flight. And I used to fly a lot.

That includes cancelled flights, which I had a lot of because I used to do at least weekly hops between two east coast cities (surprisingly staffing issues were almost as common as weather, but usually it was a combo -- eg weather causing delays in pilots arriving and then once the pilot arrives the weather is bad enough we can't take off.)

Always a survey, even if cancelled, 100% of the time.

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