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Comment by supernova87a | Hacker News Reader

As I understand it, Southwest is particularly badly affected by such issues because they run a lot of flights that are not in a hub-spoke model, but rather serial flights one non-hub city to the next and next (like eventually coming back in a loop). You can see this by going to Flightaware.com for example, and following back a flight's previous destinations. See for example https://flightaware.com/live/flight/SWA1092/history/20221223... and "track inbound plane" a couple times.

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.

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They've operated without the hub-and-spoke model years but they haven't had to operate with over 8% of their staff leaving. They're understaffed. It was a major issue with Southwest all throughout 2022 and it got brought up on their earnings call with investors. They're a budget airline and they can't afford to take that kind of staffing hit.

Not having staff didn’t seem to stop them overselling what they can handle, however. They took a risk on stretching as far as they could go in an ideal environment and here we are.

This is probably tied to how deeply ingrained the overselling habit is in the airline industry in general. They're legally protected when doing this, and it's why that doctor got dragged off that flight.

Are you referring to that time that United dragged a doctor off a Toronto bound flight? God, I will never forget that.

That was a United flight, not Southwest. Southwest and Delta are the only two good US based airlines left.

Southwest does not overbook their flights as a matter of policy.

https://www.southwest.com/help/changes-and-cancellations/ove...

Proof appears to be in the pudding here. They absolutely overbook, all airlines do. Dated a few attendants over the years and they’ve all echoed similar experiences with folks being double booked especially so during this time of year. I’ve been bumped on a SW flight, got the extra travel voucher so it worked out. They absolutely do overbook.

If you read the linked faq, there's a difference betwen overbooking and overselling. If Southwest sells all the seats for a segment, but they end up flying the segment with a different plane than scheduled, there may be less seats than scheduled passengers. That's more likely to happen furong the holidays when flights are very full and weather delays are common and there's more equipment changes.

To me, that reads as a crappy distinction intended to inspire some pity for Southwest.

The effect is the same either way. Someone paid for a ticket and they don't get to board the plane.

C'mon, there is a huge difference between an airline selling a seat they don't have and not having it due to an equipment issue.

Or, to look at it from another perspective:

The airline sold you something that they can't deliver because they refuse to keep extra planes around. They refuse to keep extra planes around because that would eat into profits, and would mean their execs wouldn't be able to buy their third gold-plated yachts.

The difference is intent. Overbooking intentionally creates conflict likely to result in a ticketed passenger unable to board. Overselling also results in a ticketed passenger unable to board, but was not intentional; at least not directly intentional. You could argue flying planes with different capabilities offers the possibility to have a lesser plane subsituted and that's an intentional choice, but...

Another way to think of it is what could an airline have reasonably done to avoid the situation? If it's overbooking, the reasonable thing is to not overbook. If it's overselling, they could choose not to fully book their scheduled equipment, but is that reasonable? They can't choose to have 100% reliable planes and crews and weather and ground operations. Stuff happens, and it's certainly reasonable to be upset when it does, but understanding why it happened can be helpful, so making a distinction between overbooking and overselling makes sense to me.

Aren't all Southwest Airlines planes identical?

No, they're all 737s, but there's a lot of variation within that.

Seatguru says [1] southwest flies three variants, 737-700 with 143 seats and 737-800 and 737-Max 8 both with 175 seats.

If a -700 gets substituted in, that's a lot of missing seats. I've also flown on planes where one seat is out of service for whatever reason and usually has a plastic cover on it.

[1] https://seatguru.com/airlines/Southwest_Airlines/information...

Thank you for the correction here

  > They're legally protected when doing this, and it's why that
  > doctor got dragged off that flight.

To be clear, it was United that dragged a doctor off a plane. Not Southwest.

As a policy Southwest is one of (the?) only airline that doesn’t overbook flights. They only sell the seats they have. From a business perspective it would be dumb to not offer all those seats for sale.

This is definitely their fault, but nothing like United pulling the doctor off the plane

Other airlines have staffing issues too.

The bottom line here is that the hub-and-spoke model is more resilient than the point-to-point model.

That is definitely not the case. The real issue is that even the staff that did show up didn't know where to go. There were employees lost for hours at Denver because the call-in scheduling system went down. Some employees hit their limits for work time before they could even obtain their assignments.

That’s a symptom. The root cause was lack of resiliency in airplane routing.

It’s the only thing that explains why Southwest was uniquely impacted this week. Every other airline has staff issues, and the same weather to deal with.

With a point to point network, the coordination problem is much larger than with a hub and spoke network. That is probably what pushed Southwest’s software over the limit. But remember, the software didn’t fail by itself in a vacuum. Resiliency problems during a weather event were the root cause.

What other airline relies entirely on a call-in scheduling system?

From a friend that works there this is not a staffing issue. It is a software issue. Apparently, their system that tells them what staff is where is broken and doesn't know where anyone is. So now they need everyone to call and tell them where they are to update the system, but the phone lines to do so are totally overwhelmed. This is also causing them to be unable to book hotels for the staff that is stranded. Most people are just buying their own hotels and hoping for reimbursement in the future.

Some additional hearsay evidence that this whatever the initial cause was it has been compounded by some massive IT failures: https://www.reddit.com/r/flying/comments/zw5lsl/southwest_pi...

This is interesting and topical considering what's happening in places like Twitter..

..And the one thing that might have saved Southwest in the past, its ferocious employee loyalty and willingness to go several extra miles when the shit hit the fan because they knew they were being taken care of, has been utterly destroyed by the new management.

People were loyal to Herb (not SWA) because Herb was loyal to them. Herb’s gone, loyalty’s gone.

You could both be right -- could be that a hub/spoke model would fare better in a software failure, because everyone would return to the hub and things would be straightened out the old-fashioned way.

I don’t fly much but I noticed things like “the same flight number takes off at the same time each day and is always the same plane as a different flight number coming the other direction.”

It must really help all the employees with routine and consistency even if it’s not optimal.

Optimal isn't the right way to think about it. It's a tradeoff. Hub-and-spoke is usually better at getting you to your destination in less absolute time given the same number of total flights since you can have more frequent "shuttle flights" that travel to the hub, exchange goods/passengers, and shuttle back. Point-to-point on the other hand, is better for minimizing travel time since you go directly to the destination.

I heard it’s optimal for staffing though because you can just have people on standby living near your spokes, which would be important if you’re dealing with cancellations, which can severely cascade with point to point

Pilots don't get into work on the morning, stay there for an entire cycle, and get back home in the night.

The planes are scheduled that way, but the people won't stay for the entire plane's cycle.

Most airlines have schedules that are consistent day-to-day. It's the efficiency vs. resiliency tradeoff that's interesting. I'd probably summarize it as "don't fly Southwest in the winter."

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.

United proactively rebooks you on a new flight if you will misconnect, gives you options in the app, and issues waivers that let you avoid weather by rebooking your own flight (often waiving fare differences as well). Haven't flown Delta or American as much, but at least United's tech is a bit more modern.

Someone below linked this company as an example of resiliency tools used in airfare. Interestingly, there's a testimonial from United on one of the front page videos.

Maybe not 1:1 for what you're describing, but it solution/reason, but does seem like a possible sign that they're investing in proactive tools.

https://www.slickor.com/

Yeah delta will do this as well. The app will let you pick any flight that day for free if you do not like the one it auto rebooked you on. I usually just take the one it gives me, but if it tries to route me through DTW or MSP with bad weather in the winter I will try to find one that goes through ATL instead.

Delta offers you a buggy website to rebook for no fee. I changed to a flight that was about $1,000 more expensive a few days ago. (note that the significant price change is an edge case caused by travelling on Christmas being particularly undesirable)

> Haven't flown Delta or American as much

Delta does this well too. Haven’t heard many good things about American.

Delta’s irregular ops procedures have always treated me right (in comms and in performance) and their app is pretty decent.

If I’ve had a missed connection en route, I’ll generally land and the app tells me what they’ve already rebooked me onto, but I have a choice of many different alternatives (usually) and can pick among them without cost and without waiting in a call queue.

As a matter of course I avoid United, and American doesn't have much presence out of SFO or OAK. Delta has done right by me each and every time something's come up.

Stuck on the tarmac in the snow and miss the connecting flight (last of the day)? They automatically rebooked me on another airline and I got a notification from the app as soon as I had reception.

3+ SFO bound flights delayed at JFK because of crazy winds at SFO? They proactively encouraged people to rebook, gratis. I rebooked on a flight the next day on nicer equipment, through the app, went into town, grabbed some bagels and had a flight at a nearly ideal time of day.

Regional plane goes tech? They had a red coat out and about keeping everyone informed.

Missed a flight because I misread the departure time? They sold me a same day ticket on the next flight at a hefty discount and I kept the inbound leg.

Southwest has a huge disadvantage and it's not tech: it's the lack of interline agreements. Nearly every other airline (except perhaps Spirit) can rebook you on another carrier when things go sideways. Southwest simply can't. With an interline agreement in place you'd have far fewer people getting stuck with exorbitant last minute fares.

In general though don't fly when you're getting unusual weather. Less than an inch of snow at PDX throws everything into chaos (and Portlanders call it fucking snowpocalypse). A few inches of snow at PWM and they don't even blink.

Notably, per the Alaska agent I spoke to about my cancelled Alaska flight, Delta doesn't let other airlines rebook on Delta flights. That may just be an Alaska/Delta thing but it's not obvious full reciprocity.

I find it hard to believe that Delta (or any other major airline) wouldn't reciprocate. When I got rebooked onto an Alaska flight, the gate agents were openly annoyed at having to accommodate Delta passengers. However, the relationship between Alaska and Delta has grown more adversarial so who knows.

I should also add that a few years back when my Southwest flight out of SFO got cancelled I was able to book a seat on a flight out of OAK with a minimum of effort. I think I had to pay the difference in fare though. When it works, it works, but the go it alone attitude will only take you so far.

United is absolute worst. Many of my colleagues are frequent flyers on United. I just do not trust United. They lost it completely when they caused that unnecessary incident where they forcibly removed that doctor from a plane. And then there is United Breaks Guitar, the viral book about their "legendary" customer service. I will never fly that airline.

My American flight on Monday was delayed (crew rest requirement was the reason given, which actually means not enough crew). It was a connecting flight so once it was about 90 min delayed it wouldn’t be possible to make the other leg.

AA live chat said they couldn’t help (other than rebooking 2 days later which would be pointless) but when I called they were able to drop the connection inbound and outbound so I could drive to the hub city airport (cost me like 2 hours each way, nbd).

They fixed it in like 3 minutes on the phone but it seems like they have to do it in a super hacky way because I had to check in at the airport which was no fun with long holiday lines.

Your claim: "crew rest requirement was the reason given, which actually means not enough crew" is incorrect.

Consider: when a flight is delayed for a repair (maintenance delay) does that equal "not enough aircraft"?

Carriers can't staff surplus crews any more than they can sit on spare aircraft, both which are small, very carefully computed quantities.

It is a crew rest requirement delay.

When I was delayed and flying delta they continually rescheduled me until I boarded one of the flights.

It was super convenient even if I was fuming over the multiple hours delay.

> don't fly Southwest in the winter.

I'd look at it the other way around: cancelling is so annoying for them that they're often the last ones to do it (barring catastrophic collapse, of course).

When I was traveling weekly out of Chicago, I always made sure to bring my Southwest credit card, just in case. Southwest sucks, but it gets you home.

> Southwest sucks, but it gets you home.

My sister was recently stranded in DFW trying to make it to SFO when American Airlines canceled her flight. They were happy to substitute another flight... to Sacramento.

So the two-hour round trip to pick her up from SFO turned into an eight-hour round trip to Sacramento. I'm amazed this was considered an acceptable substitute. Would have been nice if American was willing to get you home in the event of canceled flights.

(We could see available seats on flights from DFW to SFO at that time from Delta and Alaska. But those seats were "not available to American rebooking agents". It seems like that should have been American's problem, not ours.)

Footnote: even though my sister had to be rebooked onto the American flight to Sacramento, American didn't bother rerouting her luggage, which they sent to SFO. I guess canceling the flight meant "the plane will still fly, but without passengers".

You live 1 hour away from SFO but 4 hours away from SAC? SFO is two hours away from SAC. How is that possible? Maybe it's 3 hours away if there is traffic.

I realize that this was inconvenient and a big hassle, so I don't want to make light of it, but something seems off with the geography.

No, the travel time to and from SMF doesn't total eight hours. But there is overhead involved in making long trips that isn't necessary for short trips.

- You need to allow for a wider margin of error in predicting travel times, which means leaving earlier than strictly necessary. But leaving early doesn't mean getting back early; you have to wait for the plane to debark.

- This trip was long enough to be more demanding than an electric car could handle, requiring 30 minutes of time spent parked and charging the car.

- More time was wasted waiting for the luggage to show up; we were not informed that it hadn't been sent.

Bad weather for planes often makes road travel a lot slower than normal too.

They probably needed extra time to take care of the paperwork for the misrouted luggage and have some food. Wasting time wastes time.

At the very least, they were able to get her over the Sierras which are being dumped on right now. If they got her even to Reno, good luck getting over Donner or Echo summit for the next few days.

Except when it doesn't...

probably helps since they don't have assigned seats (afaict)

> It must really help all the employees with routine and consistency even if it’s not optimal.

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.

Yeah that model is likely why when I schedule direct flights months in advance I get my flight rescheduled for multi stop flights, often with absurdly short layovers of 15 minutes (who is going to mark that flight?).

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 wonder if this event will end up being a demonstration that they aren't sophisticated enough to use their operational model. I would think planning decisions would at least try to account for disruptions and recovery time.

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).

It also might be fine if they only have to deal with this kind of event once every few years but it lowers their costs substantially the rest of the time. I wouldn't love it as a customer, but who knows.

> 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.

Both can be true. Some people will swear them off. Some won't. Some SWA will win back with steep discounting.

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.

I’ll be driving 18 hours rather than risk a flight rescheduled 5 days (soonest available) after the original flight being cancelled, being cancelled again. Stuff sucks man. $2200 to rent a minivan for two days one way.

I feel bad for you/anyone having to pay extortionate rental car one-way rates because they're so variable/fickle. In future try something like below, before biting the bullet and paying full. But maybe in this circumstance with demand being what it is, there's no way around it.

https://blog.autoslash.com/secrets-to-getting-a-cheap-deal-o...

Yeah airline travelers are price conscious and it is a race to the bottom. If they offer some crazy sale or cheaper fares people will book it. Just look at Frontier/Spirit. They consistently get horrible reviews but people deal with it for a $50 flight.

People often try to say “airline travelers are price conscious” as if there are several options in the same price range and travelers will accept any reduction of quality or service to save a nickel (I’m not claiming you’re suggesting this). But in my experience with US domestic flights the options are basically one “cheap” decently tolerable itinerary, a few slightly cheaper itineraries that are like twice as long in total duration, and then a couple of slightly better itineraries with better amenities that literally cost like twice as much or more.

I just laugh at the upset attempts when you go to check in online: “get priority boarding and 2 inches of legroom for only an extra 50% on top of the ticket price.” I really don’t see much evidence that there was actually a race to the bottom. And I certainly won’t blame consumer preferences when I don’t see any options for slightly better service for slightly more money.

That depends on your city pair.

Boston to Las Vegas, Orlando, or San Francisco, I’ve got a wide variety of choices, 2-4 carriers flying more than that non-stops per day.

Flying from Des Moines to Presque Isle, Maine, I have only a bunch of 2 and 3 stops on United.

Boston is such a weird airport I'm not sure it's worth bringing up except as perhaps an exception that proves the rule.

BOS has the "advantage" of serving a fairly large population while also not being big enough to be a real hub for anyone[0], while being simultaneously big enough to have service from nearly everyone.

Unlike a lot of airports smaller or serving fewer people than BOS (and some of comparable size), you can get from BOS to a whole mess of hubs.

A few select routes (BOS to SFO as noted) are incredibly well-served because of the volume of lucrative business travel between the two and the fact that a whole mess of airlines already serve both airports.

[0] No, JetBlue doesn't count. Boston is as much a hub for them as CLE[1] was for Continental. I.e. a second class hub at best.

[1] CLE by comparison only really serves Cleveland. Columbus, Dayton, Cinci, Indy, Pittsburgh and probably a few others from a similar radius BOS draws from all have decent(ish) airports. All of those have basically the same problem as CLE or are worse in some way. I've flown through or into and out of all of them.

CVG is still a Delta hub

For the ~75,000 travelers directly impacted, it will probably have some long-term impact in their purchasing decisions.

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.

Yeah but they're also possibly less the type to go out of their way to hunt for Southwest flights, which don't ever show up on aggregators

I wonder if they'll need to start working with aggregators after this fiasco? (Assuming they start losing their current customer base)

This actually is what prevents me from buying flights from them. The only time I do it is when someone asks for them specifically.

Just as with ISPs, for many people in the US, true airline choice is not a luxury they have. Depending on their origin and destination, there may be only one airline that flies it, or only one that flies without a ridiculous set of stops or layovers. Even if people want to switch airlines, unless they live near a major airport or have high flexibility on when and where to fly, it's not really practical.

Yeah, I have 2 reasonably drivable airports that are both served by Delta. It's even the case that I can mostly get a less expensive flight with a good itinerary (airport to hub to destination) or a more expensive flight with a bad itinerary (airport to hub to other hub to destination).

Is Southwest the lone primary carrier for many of their airports?

> Is Southwest the lone primary carrier for many of their airports?

SWA is generally one of the bigger users of any particular airport they use as SWA tends to avoid the "primary tier" hub airports.

SWA examples: Providence or Nashua, not Boston. Houston Hobby--not Intergalactic. Chicago Midway not O'Hare. San Jose rather than San Francisco. etc.

Southwest now flies into O'Hare, but the majority of their flights go to Midway.

Even when there are choices, the price difference between the choices can be absurdly high. You can't call people "cheap" when they choose the cheapest option, and the other options are 2 or 3 times the cost for service that's only slightly better, maybe.

Southwest is not an exclusive option in any of the cities they serve.

> but rather serial flights one city to the next

i would imagine that's especially vulnerable to disruption as any delay/issue is magnified throughout the rest of the flights.

point to point was how every airline operated before gas prices and decreasing ticket prices caused airlines to focus on concentrating pax loads. it's not quirky; it's just not cost effective.

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.

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