Southwest cancels 5,400 flights in less than 48 hours
npr.org
npr.org
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.
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.
There’s also greyhound and Amtrak.
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.
https://twitter.com/flyingtigress/status/1607739070687371268
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.
Regardless - don't check anything you aren't prepared to say goodbye to.
https://www.southwest.com/help/accessible-travel-assistance/...
And usually not in a city other than your point of departure or expected arrival.
Southwest should be responsible for making it worse.
Who can step in to make some baseline rules that corporations have to abide by so people aren't screwed like this?
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.
You have never forgotten to pack something, or perhaps forgotten an important detail in a stressful situation?
They jump around the country, much less frequently going back to a hub as other airlines do. That means that the planes and crews have a relatively harder time recovering from system-wide disasters because they don't have as part of normal operations as much ability to centralize or pool resources and get people/planes reorganized. (everyone go back to base, consolidate passengers, crew, planes and redeploy them and sort things out in one place)
Unfortunate, but that's their model. Good for some purposes, not so good for others. Maybe it's them being quirky and an active choice. I mean, up until a few years ago they did not fly to Hawaii because their scheduling system / people / processes did not want to have redeye flights.
The bottom line here is that the hub-and-spoke model is more resilient than the point-to-point model.
It must really help all the employees with routine and consistency even if it’s not optimal.
That said, I flew Southwest from SJC to LAS for CES one year, connecting in SAN. Weather wasn't great, and they'd put you on the next available flight with an empty seat. They were even able to shuffle people without going up to the podium. Legacy carriers would have drug their feet, there'd be a line, and they'd charge for the privilege of changing flights.
The Box ( https://www.amazon.com/Box-Shipping-Container-Smaller-Econom... ) has some interesting things to say about this.
In that book, the ordinary logistical setup is that ships tend to cover individual transit routes, which means that a delay affecting one ship doesn't spread through the system. Malcom McLean tries to set up a system of ships that always sail east instead, and it fails very badly, because delays on each individual leg of the (infinitely long!) route accumulate instead of happening and then fading away.
The planes are scheduled that way, but the people won't stay for the entire plane's cycle.
It was a pain so much I stopped flying them. I’d buy a ticket and have to babysit it so that a flight from noon to 6pm didn’t morph over several changes into a multi stop marathon from 8am to 9pm…..
I see lots of people who are at least quite a bit less likely to use them in the future (and they are still in the middle of trying to fix it).
Meh, everybody always says that. In six months when this is a distant memory… it will be business as usual.
For me (I am affected), this is actually another in a series of recent events that are making me reconsider my preference for SWA. They are no longer a "cheap" airline, routinely more expensive than the other major carriers. Their planes are not nice anymore. I've flown on a few other airlines over the past few years and found their planes to be nicer with more features (like chargers and phone/tablet holders). And now this. The cancellations are one thing, but they totally botched the communication of it, and their practice of delaying flights throughout the day only to cancel half of them after several hours left people stranded.
Will I stop using them? We'll see how they respond, but they may not be my first choice anymore.
But for the 329,925,000 other Americans, many of whom have a long history and belief in Southwest’s reputation for customer service and fair policies? They will have forgotten by next week.
i would imagine that's especially vulnerable to disruption as any delay/issue is magnified throughout the rest of the flights.
SWA can do this bc they operate a single aircraft type (737), have lower opex (they operate closer to spirit than delta internally and they do things like not allowing full GDS access to force leisure travelers to book through their website), and they keep their aircraft around a while. they also have a smaller network than the bigger airlines do, which further lowers opex.
However, SWA isn't truly point to point seeing as how a lot of their traffic flows through Chicago (MDW), Dallas (DAL) and Houston (HOU) and they have huge hangars and service ops out of these locations.
hubs aren't immune to huge cancellation numbers like this. American and United were heavily impacted during the 2021 Winter storm. Had the storm happened during the busiest peak travel season of the year like it did this year, they would have had record cancellations as well.
https://www.dallasnews.com/business/local-companies/2016/08/...
at the time, then-CEO now-chairman Gary Kelly said:
> "What's unique is the partial failure, it's never happened," he said. "This isn't a drill you can run."
https://web.archive.org/web/20161112192103/http://www.dallas...
Delta had a similar outage due to a datacenter fire, grounding all domestic flights. Southwest was uniquely slow in taking days to start up again. And if the way my American Airlines ticket switched my birthdate to January 1st, 2000 is any indication, many airlines still need to modernize.
Most of the travel industry runs on old software that would horrify a lot of people here, especially those who've never worked for a large, 30+ year old company. When I used to interview a lot of people I made it a point to mention some of the more "interesting" aspects so they'd know what they were getting into.
One example: ever tried to book a flight a year in advance? On a lot (almost all?) of systems you can't, because the underlying date format is "DEC27".
Edit to address a couple comments: logistics are hard and there are plenty of reasons why airlines wouldn't want to support booking that far out. However, the reason you can book a flight 330 days from now but not 360 days from now is almost certainly due to the date format. (I believe the windows used are less than 365 days because it's helpful to be able to have dates in the recent past. I remember seeing documentation for 360, but AA and United seem to be in the 330-340 range on their websites).
Also speaking as a software engineer myself, it's almost never just a software fix that will magically solve everybody else's problems, that always ends up being just wishful thinking
If you can see how it works, it horrifies me even more as a traveller, as from outside it just doesn't work a lot of the time.
Also if you just look at the video, we all know how bad these systems are, but are not able to do anything (starting anything new in the airline industry has too much cost).
6 years old so hopefully something has improved...
As someone who writes some very thorough unit tests... and also have had to have mandatory training... I find "this isn't a drill you can run" to be _very_ wrong.
It would not surprise me that their back-office operations are likewise economized and some things are just not done because "they can never happen."
They're also the "friendly airline", they easily have the most personable and friendly staff. I don't know what they do different, but Southwest employees treat me human and all the rest generally treat me like human trash. It's got to be a company culture thing, maybe connected to Southwest not having a first-class section.
Usually I fly with Southwest whenever possible without thinking twice about it, but this outage and the outage last year are forcing me to reconsider. Better to deal with rude people than to have my flight delayed..
Meh, it doesn't even have to be "never". It just has to be cost multiplied by frequency is less than the cost to prepare.
If they lose $100m every five years due to a system failure, and it would cost $30m/year to plan for those failures, they it's just cheaper to let it happen.
And I don't mean this in a judgmental, Fight Club-car recall speech kind of way. It's just business reality. At some point every business has to decide that the cost of planning for something is higher than the cost of letting it happen.
Southwest isn't a particularly budget airline compared to modern budget carriers like spirit and ryanair that haven't copied the open boarding policy. I suspect the opportunity to upsell seats / luggage and have distinct classes outweighs the turnaround time costs of assigned seating.
Thorough unit and integration tests include failure modes. Mine include things like "what happens if the OS reports that the storage was unmounted during read/write" (because that was a failure often seen in production with some flaky SAN devices) and "what happens if the server stops responding" (because networks are generally unreliable) and "what happens if invalid (random) data is given" because data corruption is a frequent occurrence for similar reasons.
> Perhaps you have a false sense of security about what you’ve really been testing?
Perhaps. On the other hand I've seen a _lot_ of other developers test only the happy path and call it a day then spend days/weeks/months debugging failures.
As a IT-VP/CIO, the statement of "there's no way to test it" is not acceptable.
When we first started doing it the datacenter would be chosen months in advance so that teams would have plenty of time to ensure their services can run without that specific datacenter.
When I left this year, the datacenter would be randomly chosen on the same day it would be cut off.
Pull the backup tapes, hand those to DR team, provide bare metal, and start the stopwatch. I participated in this in 1990s across the Mississippi.
(Look forward, reason backward).
I think you've mistaken this for something immediately increases quarterly gains with no regard to long-term strategy.
The unspoken part you have to hear there is "... within the economic model of the airline business".
Business continuity gets exponentially more expensive as you chase the blackest of swans: the sheer volume of plan development and maintenance, developing exercises, table-top vs. walkthrough vs. simulation, assumptions about how many different uncorrelated failures you're prepared for deal with at once etc.
I've no doubt you could run an airline to be as resilient as (say) USAF Air Mobility Command, but no-one could afford the tickets.
The thought was that it needs to be something that isn’t believable to a non-technical user seeing it on their computer screen. It turns out that this is not necessarily useful. I listened to a guy talking about some issues with a record; he says “1871? What’s up with that?” And then just moved on as if “well it came out of the computer, must be right” or something.
I think that databases need to have the concept of NaN for dates and time stamps, except that this should be configurable to something like a poop emoji or something like ⁉🆘. It has to be something where your grandma would look at it and confidently say “your computer is broken”
They only have one geo-located data-centre?
The difference between what's true, what some people will buy, and what you can get away with saying is gross, y'all.
Netflix and airlines are so different as to make this comparison laughable. The cost of setup and consequence of problems actually being found (ie Federal Regulations) that are not addressable (it's not like SWA didn't know about some of the eventualities), easily outclasses the need for testing every combination of situations. Kong doesn't run anything that has to do with weather turning jet fuel into sludge or 12x pre-staffing in case of massive computer failures along with assessing the possible legal consequences from each locale. The hubris of pretending that physical services on a national scale, is as deterministic as a complex automated system, is unsurprising from a certain crowd, I guess.
Investment capitalism is really a garbage system when it comes to building and maintaining basic infrasctructure like transportation, electricity grids, roads and so on. China has demonstrated that convincingly over the past two decades, hasn't it?
When characterized as something that can't be done instead of something they don't know how to do, you know exactly where they are on the Dunning–Kruger curve.
It sounds like there is a semi-automated system which broke somehow, or more likely failed to support the load of cascading changes that resulted from weather disruptions, and they simply don't have the capacity or flexibility to deal with this other than by cancelling flights for three days until they can sort everything out manually.
Reading between the lines a bit, one possible root cause is that their semi-automated system required crew members to update their status by phone when something goes wrong (perhaps with another human in the loop), and the sheer volume of disruption overloaded their phone system and resulted in the automated system becoming completely decoupled from the actual state of reality without sufficient bandwidth in the phone channel to get it back in sync in a reasonable amount of time.
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: 1. Please be patient with us. We desperately want to do everything we can to get you where you’re going. 2. 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. 3. 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. 4. 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——
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.
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.
Software is core to your business. If you don't invest in it, you're going to pay the price.
Saved screenshot: https://i.imgur.com/bchgmm7.jpeg
* this memo[1] from the SWA VP thats circulating dated December 21st calling a staffing emergency saying all hell is about to break loose. I'm pretty sure that guy didn't know of the software crash before it happened
* Every single piece of checked in luggage is going to take 30+ days to be found? Weird none of the extensive press has mentioned people not getting their bag. Also its pretty much an airport thing and not an airline thing. Airports are in charge of deplaning your luggage and bringing it to you
* They're running 40% of flights completely manually with 0 scheduling software? That's extremely impressive
[1] https://mobile.twitter.com/ruthschmidt/status/16074609858619...
That memo is specifically about ground operations at DEN, and specifically because of the arctic weather conditions and a high number of sick calls and ramp agents that outright quit. You can earn more flipping burgers in Denver than you can as a SWA gate agent with five years of experience. Failing to pay staff is also a management failure.
The scheduling software crashed due to the number of pilots and flight attendants that were out of position and the number of changes that were made to the schedule. I would imagine that there was an overflow in some situation -- i.e. "the number of changed schedules should never exceed 65535" that worked every year until this one. But this system was already known to be unstable, another Reddit comment said that "there are settings you don't change for fear the entire thing will crash." Which it has before in 2016. Not expecting that history will repeat itself and doing something about it is also a management failure.
> Also its pretty much an airport thing and not an airline thing
Absolutely incorrect. While the airport runs the automated conveyance system that gets the bag from where the rampers drop it to the baggage claim, the people that handle the baggage at every manual step in between are SWA employees. If there aren't enough of them, the bags don't make it on the plane on time.
Notice that the people doing this work for Southwest Airlines are all wearing Southwest uniforms.
Like most complicated failures, this was failure with multiple causes and contributing factors. The core of the problem seems to be that management was rent-seeking without making appropriate structural changes to keep up with system load.
Additionally I was told (by a crew member) Southwest refused to meet wage demands with ramp / fuel crews so they all quit. Apparently they sent them an email basically saying a recession is coming so be thankful you have a job... Meanwhile all other jobs pay more in the area. Anecdote I know, but we did have to wait 2.5 hours for fuel on my flight.
i believe this story. the scheduling system is too fragile and can’t automatically pick up disruptions to crew movement. they’re still manually scheduling some crews, but I think their main problem is they don’t have a way of knowing which crews are where and therefore can’t schedule flights. and it’s not every single piece that’s going to take 30 days, but it seems pretty likely that some bags will be lost that long.
It appears there was a MASSIVE disconnect between baggage and people, bags are ending up all over the place even though the people never left.
Why not? Some things aren't hard to predict, it's like a Ticketmaster employee saying "our site is probably going to go down when the Taylor Swift tour goes live". If you know your systems are deficient then you can predict they'll fail in a crisis, especially if that failure has happened before (as it has for Southwest).
That depends on the airline and airport. It’s extremely common for the airline which operates out of a large part of a terminal to do their own ramp work.
Southwest employs thousands of ramp agents to do their own ground ops and under-wing work at their bases.
This is amazing. Southwest was famous for its operational efficiency and quality. Companies eagerly learned from them. I wonder what has changed.
https://www.reddit.com/r/bestof/comments/zwd1fq/u4sammich_ex...
https://www.reddit.com/r/flying/comments/zw5lsl/southwest_pi...
This has to be really hard as most systems were probably built assuming something that smelled like full staffing. Pilots can only fly X hours, and flight attendants usually can't be forced to take overtime ... there have to be similar constraints on ground crew, maintenance and gate workers, too. So when you are planning for an understaffed airline, it has to be extremely difficult to optimize where the failures will occur.
Like what do they do with the bags that are sitting on the plane for cancelled flights? Store them where they are? Figure out their origin and start queuing them to be sent there? Try to get information from the passenger about where to send it?
And then with planes and crews, do they even have "potential" flights where they would be able to reliably seat a worthwhile number of passengers?
Eventually you send them back to the passenger's home address. I've had lost luggage before that turned up on my front porch a week later, some courier service had dropped it off.
In practice, crews have their home base, their corresponding qualifications (though for WN they probably only have one or two types)
And you can bet you can start cancelling flights once you don't have enough crew. Problem is, your crew might have gone over their allowed time and them (and your plane) are in Smallville, OH and there are passengers in Chicago waiting to fly.
Even if you could do that at an airline the margins are so razor thin. I bet there's a dollar value assigned to every second a plane is not in the air.
You either pay the predictable, ongoing cost or you pay the massive, unpredictable cost like they are currently. There's no free lunch. That is, unless you're an executive looking to boost short-term profits by eliminating "redundancy" and then peacing out before the whole thing collapses from your short-sighted, greedy ineptitude.
I had a partner who worked on airline optimization several years ago, as I recall there were standby aircraft in some places that could be deployed to fix problems like a plane needing unexpected maintenance. Or even needing a single label required to be flightworthy. That Southwest doesn't use hubs likely makes it more difficult to recover from this kind of disruption before breaking.
https://www.kinexcappers.com/accumulation-table/ https://www.nerconconveyors.com/Nercon/Documents/White-Paper...
Though I'm not sure it would have helped in this case.
Yes, there's a dollar value attached to everything and everything is being optimized. Southwest was among the pioneers. See the story of the ten minute turn.
I hope that DOT follows through on their earlier statement that they're going to investigate this. The CEO of Southwest has ruined more Christmases than the Grinch. Failures like this should trigger incredibly severe consequences (tickets refunded at 4x cost, $20/day paid to any passenger whose luggage is lost until they get it, lost slots in airports) that make it absolutely irrational to operate in the manner Southwest is.
When a storm hits a city, yes, the first plane that had to wait to take off from the airport can be said to be delayed by weather. Every other plane waiting in line behind that plane, delayed, or because they weren't able to get to that city from other destinations because they run an overly tight schedule, is due to operational choices by the airline.
Some airlines have hubs in places where snow is handled ok. Some don't. Others have them in places that have frequent thunderstorms. Some airlines operate in Hawaii and never have delays.
JetBlue used to fly A321s across the country and in the winter, strong winds would force them to stop in Kansas to refuel. That's "weather" but also the airline's choices about how to operate.
I don't think you'll ever find the FAA/DOT is going to "root cause" what weather means to airlines to be able to blame them for operational / strategic choices. It would be like the police writing up your car accident report and saying that the reason you had a fender bender was because you chose to live so far away from work.
Thus, choose your airlines and roll your dice accordingly for when you want to get where you want to be.
It's difficult to punish the kind of individual cases you're describing, but from a game theory perspective that just means that in situations like today's, you bring down the hammer in incredibly punitive fashion in order to make a single systemwide failure like this so costly that it's a no-brainer to upgrade software and keep slack in the system (particularly at high-traffic, high-importance times like the holidays).
No need to implement the penalties you described if you’re simply trying to align incentives. Their market cap has fallen by $1b, primarily due to this incident.
The reality is they save a lot of money by keeping virtually no slack in their system and not doing things like scaling up customer service during the holidays. If they lose some money in flight cancellations, it's still rational for them to operate like this. Plus the reality is they probably won't actually lose much - most people whose flights were cancelled will still end up taking Southwest because it's too expensive (or not possible) to book last minute tickets on other airlines. That means they just push them into the very end of Dec/early Jan when they have open capacity anyway.
When planes and crew are delayed somewhere, it cascades down the entire line and all the aircraft and crews are now at the wrong airports.
With the hub system, they can do a "return to base" and try to go from there, but with Southwest not having a "base" they have to esentially halt the entire system and reboot it, which is what is going on here.
At least that's part of the mess.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/245236750_Airline_S...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/030504...
Another important component is disaster recovery. How quickly can the system recover from missed flights? What is the game plan for dealing with crews/airplanes that are out of place. How will they return to normal operations? Often times having a play book everyone is working from can lead to faster recoveries than dealing with each individual crisis as it happens, often with either too much micromanagement from leadership or too little coordination between departments. The play book generates a conciseness before the system is stressed.
Airline pax are probably not willing to pay for spare standby aircraft and flight and cabin crews at every airport every airline operates from.
Southwest’s original low-cost carrier business innovation was to run an all-737 fleet and make business-wide efforts to optimize for fast ground-turns, in order to get more flights out of each aircraft.
Airlines have crew on "reserve" at all times near bases to handle this problem. They are being paid to sit around and not actually work unless called in. Pilots love to try to get on the reserve list for obvious reasons.
I don't know how Southwest handles reserve, since they don't have "bases" like other airlines do.
Good luck finding pilots to be “on-call” to fly anywhere in the world (and most commonly to small US cities) on a moments notice, with a jump seat return flight as their way home (after a night in a small city hotel).
The two classes of solutions that I considered where optimization solvers (see Gurobi Optimization for example), and meta-heuristics (see the book Metahueristics: From Design to Implementation). If I remember correctly, the people at Gurobi started at a previous company which was spun out of an airline, but I might be confused. All the algorithms in both classes of solutions are so nuanced that it can take years to begin to grasp how their strengths and weaknesses interact with your particular scheduling challenge, and how the way you formulate the problem interacts with the ability of the algorithm to solve it.
All that said, the real problem for me was a human one: If you produce a viable schedule X, the organization involved will always want to alter the rules to stretch the available resources to cover more, and simultaneously all the schedule staff will want more flexibility and nuance in expressing their preferences. You, as the author of scheduling software, are caught between them. Neither side is ever happy with the result.
I occasionally daydream about revisiting resident scheduling (I don't recommend it, the people who use your software leave every year, are not business oriented, and don't understand the complexity of the task until they've tried it on their own their first and only attempt). If I did, I would focus less on algorithms, and more on incentives to reconcile the tension between the organization, which wants to cover the most shifts with the fewest people at the cost of flexibility and preferences, and the staff, who want more flexibility and more preferences satisfied. I think that is the core problem at a business level.
It is not about code or algorithm quality, it is about procedural side of things -- how the organisation is "programmed" to respond to failures. I use the word "programmed" in a very broad sense -- for me setting up a paper checklist and being able to rely on people to follow it is the same as programming.
I suspect the main difference between airlines and banks is that banks can afford to throw money on the problem and just get things done regardless of how inefficiently.
Airlines are in the much worse position -- they were able to afford being inefficient and throwing money at the problem in the past but can't do it anymore. They work with old, outdated software that wasn't built with efficiency in mind but now don't have funds to change it and are forced to maintain what they have. This may also be the answer to why sometimes they just don't have capacity to react to problem and let it cascade to bring everything to a halt.
You can poke around at the website for SlickOR (https://www.slickor.com/) to get an idea of the surface level work that goes into this.
As others have pointed out, they don't fly hub-and-spoke.
So when they get planes stranded somewhere, it screws up the entire system and all the planes and all the crew end up at the wrong airports, and it's extremely difficult to get everything back to where it's supposed to be.
They almost have to literally shut down the airline and start it up again, which is what you are seeing now.
Was that just where I lived (primarily in the east), or am I missing something?
Save your receipts, and submit a reimbursement request. Escalate if needed.
Was a blessing in disguise for me as I could find a similar flight on a different airline. Hope anyone else flying Southwest can find a way to their destination
Wait, what issue? Those words didn't actually say anything.
Is this implying that it was a software failure with the scheduling software?
Any info on the details? Like, I'd think this is what scheduling software is for...
The direct company sites (not Expedia for example) do not give you the ability to search for vehicles at multiple locations within a mileage radius. You are forced to enter a single location for pickup. This is also true for drop off.
From what I can tell, rental car companies are not setup to easily service a one way rentals, which is what most people need right now. I’ve managed to reserve a car for pickup in KC and drop off in Phoenix for tomorrow. The quote for the two days, over $1200. This isn’t really a web site issue but it gives some context.
Here’s the baffling bit. I make a reservation this morning at Enterprise in a KC suburb and get back a confirmation number, cool. Five minutes later I get a call back that they don’t have any cars available. I ask him why, because I got the confirmation number. He says the website isn’t accurate at the moment. WTF? So when a car is rented and driven off the lot the database doesn’t update? Or worse, the local dealer data is not synced to corporate in real time?
This is a cascading mess. They don’t even have availability in Joplin, MO who’s is 3 hours from KC.
The reservation system probably overbooks to some extent because a certain percentage of reserved cars are never picked up.
Many rental outlets are franchise operations. It may say Enterprise or Budget on the sign but it's Joe's Car Rental LLC running the place. They may be slow at updating rentals and returns in the system. It's not all one homogenous company.
https://www.enterprise.com/en/global-franchise-opportunities...
> Please note that we do not franchise our brands in Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Spain, France or Germany.
Earlier this year, I reserved a mid-size vehicle for a few days' drive for a business trip, and after they charged my card, they told me they're bringing around a compact vehicle. I probably should have let it go, the difference in price wasn't that much (and was a work expense) but old habits die hard. "That's not what I paid for - either you can refund me the difference, or you can bring me a mid-size sedan."
They said if I could wait 15 minutes, they'd bump me up from a Hyundai Accent to a larger Toyota, but it wasn't until I sat in the car that I learned that even as a new car, it was as bare-bones as they make them. No CarPlay/Android Auto, the in-car GPS was disabled, no cruise control - I'm sure it would have had manual windows if that were an option. The Hyundai would have been a better ride, I shouldn't have fussed.
But yeah, U-Haul or Ryder or whatever, it's the stone ages there. Years ago, I drove halfway across the state to pick up a sixteen foot truck I'd reserved, and when I got there - "Yeah we don't have a sixteen foot truck, I don't know why it let you reserve that." A smaller truck wasn't an option for what we were moving. I ended up having to call around and hit some local place up.
Called Penske, because I'd always had a good business relationship with them via my job. I was told, "Oh, yeah, we don't do that shit. If you book a truck that day, it's gonna be here, guaranteed."
Sure enough, Penske had it. We packed up the truck, I got on the road, and about 45 minutes later I got a call from UHaul telling me that I could pick up an available truck, but it was three hours away.
I laughed loudly and just hung up.
* In the US, Hertz with corporate discounts and status is usually the cheapest and most convenient option. Walk to the car, pick your car from the President's Circle, drive off. Absolutely the best experience I've had with rentals.
* Without status, it's a coin toss: Avis or Hertz, with Avis generally having worse service across the board.
* In Europe, Avis was the worst. In Israel I think it's a franchise, it was all manual entries, long waiting lines. In Portugal I had to wait in line for 1.5 hours to pick up the car because I wasn't Preferred. Their Preferred booth was empty the entire time. All I had to do was validate my drivers license, and they still refused to accept me at Preferred because they print the preferred customers in the morning. Almost missed my flight.
* Europcar in Israel - cheaper but I wasted an hour in line to _return_ the car.
* In Aruba (I think), Avis doesn't tell you they run shuttles to the airport and you have to wait 30+ min for the shuttle to come around and pick you up.
* I rented 26' trucks from U-Haul twice. Both times went well, though the first truck was very bouncy and the second truck's engine light was on, but otherwise I got from A to B with no issues.
But this all pales in comparison to this car rental company in Moldova (Eastern Europe) that took $100 to book an SUV a month in advance, and then when I arrived they said "we don't have it". The only car they had was $50/day more expensive and instead of apologizing and giving me that car, despite being more expensive, they told me that my only option was to pay more to get this car. They were fixing the A/C outside while I was trying to explain to them that it was a ridiculous demand. A bunch of crooks. I walked away. Sixt was a better experience there, and cheaper than Avis, though 4rent.md is definitely the best option with great customer service.
As Seinfeld said, they're good at taking the reservation, but not good at holding it.
I rented one earlier this month online. When I showed up they handed me a confirmation and told me to pick a car and drive, key was in the cup holder. They had a manned exit barricade to confirm the car you chose, but that was it. I'm not even sure they cared if I picked a car that I didn't reserve, the exit gate person scanned the car and reservation, so it probably would have just updated the reservation on the spot. I don't think it's even possible to predict with certainty what your inventory is going to be 2-3 days out with this sytem.
Just 2 people on the rental side, although I'm sure they have a cleaning/ turnover crew.
Same thing happened to me. My wife even called the night before and talked to someone (not at the airport, though) and confirmed. The guy at the pickup had to tell 6 people at 6am that they were only honoring reservations made at least three days prior, and all of them had confirmed numbers.
Likewise, no cars are available within a two hour drive. It looks like the first few days of problems sucked up any available inventory in the system.
More generally they schedule based on their return schedules. If they have a car scheduled to return at noon and you set your pickup time to one, they assume they'll have that car and be able to rent it to you. If I don't drop it off at noon they can't assume I'll drop it off at 12:01 so they need to let you know it won't be available (since they can't predict my actions).
This is all compounded by agents on the lot renting out cars under the radar or booking agents doing some customer service override. They are incentivized to rent cars, not rent to specific people. For them it doesn't matter if your car is unavailable, it got rented out which made them money.
Good luck getting a car and making your drive.
I've had great luck booking an enterprise rental car from an airport (this is key), and on the booking saying returning to the same airport.
After receiving the car, calling corporate and requesting a different city drop off. The only requirement being that it was dropped off at another airport.
Paid $75 a day for an SUV, from SF and dropped off in Bishop, CA. Reno was the same cost, as well but Bishop made sense. Did this a week ago. Worst case there's an additional cost but is it going to be $1,000 more... no way.
Which isn't surprising because at some point, someone needs to bring that car back to it's home base.
On rental cars, I know it’s a meme, but my god it continually surprises me how it seems the agents have to rewrite the mainframe just to hand me keys for a pre-arranged reservation.
Some of my ex-wife's colleagues returned from a conference in Denver back to the east coast in a u-haul van after all air travel was shut down on 9/11
irrops and cancellations during holidays has unfortunately been normal especially since COVID but I'm guessing fewer employees and the winter storm would cause this to happen.
Massive Southwest Airlines disruption leaves customers stranded - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34145286 - Dec 2022 (102 comments)
We don't often see freezing rain here. It creates a hard, bubbly layer of ice that cannot be scraped off with the usual tool.
Every rental car in Nebraska is unavailable for the next few days which is crazy.
There aren’t enough pilots in the pipeline and your neighborhood is doing everything it can to shut down your local GA airport where people actually learn to fly.
Would 100% support an executive getting a long prison sentence on this as well. I know it will never happen but serious consequences are the only way stuff like this stops happening.
It's a satisfying job for the right personality type!
I fly very rarely. One of the reasons is that I cannot afford to fly on carriers who charge the correct fare for sufficient quality that actually reliably gets you to your destination.
For destinations on the local rail network, I can afford it.
And they did it over Christmas and during big storms to maximize the impact to the company.
Logistics problems, especially the logistics of moving humans, are both complicated and complex. You are talking about systems which must interact with manual, human-in-the-loop processes every step of the way. The feedback loops between the digital systems and physical systems are often loose and very costly to tighten (regulations, union rules, passenger behaviors) and the underlying systems that all participants must interact with were some of the very first widespread digital systems.
Today's problem was probably preventable, but don't underestimate how hard the problems become as soon as a system begins to depend on humans and the real world.
And that’s why we’re in this position to begin with… until someone comes along to disrupt it.
For actual mission critical systems, like delivering packages, UPS Airlines uses a cool concept called a hot spares where an extra airplane is somewhere in the sky, ready to take on slack if there were issues on another plane
Not unless this new CTO's roadmap includes development of a time machine. Engineering design alone will not prevent this kind of outcome.
Why couldn’t all of these things be handled easily through the app?
Maybe it won’t prevent my flight from being cancelled, but when they do cancel my flight I’m not left scrambling to figure a plan B so I don’t miss meeting my family for the holidays.
/ this was a lonng time ago, like 10+ years, it could be a very very different animal now