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.
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.
Delta does this well too. Haven’t heard many good things about American.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It was super convenient even if I was fuming over the multiple hours delay.
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.
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".
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.
- 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.
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.