There really should be laws or regulations that fine airlines for this kind of behavior and compensate passengers. Reliability failures that have that much impact on people need more consequences than just seeking another airline next time.
EU and other countries like Indonesia have laws that do exactly this. Light touch regulation really. Airlines can plan as they wish, but if you leave passengers stranded (or massively delay their journey) you have to pay the customer directly.
It‘s a bit of a question whether this would be fully covered by EU 261 (including compensation etc.), as it contains exemption clauses for events that are outside the airlines control. So you‘d need to argue here that the failure was not due to the storm, but rather due to bad planning. Might fall either way.
AFAIK they still need to make sure you get food and a place to sleep, though.
EU261 is a good model that we should look to implement here, basically you are due 600 euros when a flight is cancelled, and varying amounts for delays. It's absolutely insane that airlines can strand you for days and are not required to give accommodations overnight or any compensation.
In theory, yes. In practice, I got delayed for a day on one of the flights from Prague to Paris (pre-COVID times) due to the flight being late by hours and me missing the connection. They gave me the hotel, but refused any compensation beyond that. I tried to get them to pay via AirHelp, they took 3 years and said they can't do anything. The law is one thing, getting it is quite another.
FWIW Southwest is refunding fares and covering lodging, meals, and rebookings on other airlines. Not sure how much more we could ask for except the impossible “go back in time and don’t screw up.”
i've read that they will be reimbursing some people for their meals/lodging/rebooking, which can be a huge burden for people with bad/no credit or savings. i also believe that DOT is only able to provide enforcement of reimbursements or vouchers for southwest because southwest had made promises that they would in the past
i'd like to see all airlines required to provide the sort of compensation that southwest is providing here
Reimbursing for lodging and meals by submitting a receipt at a later date is not the same thing as taking stranded customers out of the airport to a hotel and giving them food vouchers. There are plenty of people who have been stuck sleeping in airports because they can not afford to pay peak walk-up holiday rates for 4 or 5 days. Those people are sleeping at the airport. This is happening in Denver, Austin, Midway etc. The news media is chock full full of these no lodging horror stories.
Further Southwest famously does not have interline or code sharing agreements with other carriers that would allow their agents to rebook passengers on a different airline. This is yet another detail of Southwest operations that is exacerbating the situation.
I’ll believe it when I see it, I am out of pocket $500 so far in chaining my own flights on other airlines to get to my destination after my SW flight on Christmas Eve was cancelled. They offered a rebooking only on their own routes on the 27th which would have been cancelled again in hindsight. I am finally headed to my final destination today 4 days later on another airline as I didn’t expect SW to pay for any of the extra costs.
The market can more than solve this, if it's an issue. We don't need to impose yet another regulatory burden on an industry already nearly completely insulated from competitive forces that drive innovation.
One would hope that the market could work this out, and when people went looking for options, would keep this in mind.
Instead what people do is find the lowest fare possible, all other considerations be damned. It’s not like this is the first time this has happened to SW.
We do mandate safety in general. (Probably less so in some countries than others.) So you mostly can't choose to fly an airline that defers maintenance to cut costs.
Presumably the consequence of regulators making canceling and delaying flights expensive is that airlines pay more to reduce the likelihood of that happening and fares go up as a result.
Whether that's good or bad is a matter of perspective I guess. Regulators could implement a lot of rules that would make flying more pleasant. But prices would go up.
Trouble with the free market here is that starting a new airline is all but impossible. Only so many slots available at airports and they’re all taken.
Yes, you can choose a more expensive airline but let’s not pretend Delta, United etc don’t also have huge delays and failures from time to time. Up until now Southwest’s reputation really hasn’t been bad, they’re no Frontier. No matter, there should be avenues for compensation.
> One would hope that the market could work this out
Southwest did lose 10% of its market value overnight, so it seems the market is punishing them. Given how much executive compensation is in stock, a lot of senior level folks at Southwest are likely feeling some pain (or, least, as much pain as any very rich person ever feels).
> Instead what people do is find the lowest fare possible, all other considerations be damned.
That's an over-simplification. Yes, passengers are very price sensitive. But whenever I talk to friends and family about travel, it's become increasingly clear that they factor predicted quality of service in to their choice.
I don't fly United and try to avoid American. I'm certain that many many people will hesitate to fly on Southwest after this. People aren't stupid and no one wants to roll the dice on an entire vacation just to save twenty bucks.
I don't totally agree with this. Prices between airlines and routes can vary dramatically to the same destination so it's not like saving 20$ will usually be the difference between the cheapest option and a more preferred option. Also if you look at situations like Volkswagen, it seems to me that neither governments nor consumers hit them very hard after their massive scandal a few years ago. I see new VWs all over the place.
I love my Volkswagen. In theory I care about emissions test cheating but in practice it wouldn’t affect my decision to buy in the future. It’s the best designed and built car I’ve ever had and so Volkswagen group brands will always be on the top of my list of cars to look at.
A couple of VW execs went to prison and it cost the company 30 billion, that feels like getting hit hard enough by governments. What more do you want?
In practice when you need to fly from one city to another at a specific time there is often only one option available. So customers have no ability to pay more for higher reliability even if they want to.
Well, in my case I had a really bad experience with United in 2011, connecting at LAX. After that I just never fly United or fly to/from LAX. My sanity is worth more than a few hundred bucks.
There is, that is why they are trying to blame it on the weather. If it is weather they do not have to compensate people, if it a failure due to their own systems well there are all kinds of provisions that require compensation
Or we could just make airlines always liable for any situation where they fail to get you to where they said they were going to get you by when they said they were going to get you. Like literally any service that is not delivered as promised. The problem will solve itself very rapidly.
No, if they kill someone, they will get fined for gross negligence on top of the inevitable tort case (file it under "airline malpractice"). I am not asking them to fly in terrible weather: I am asking them to have enough slack in the system that one outage does not destroy their entire system because places unconnected to the weather are affected when planes they expect to arrive never do.
The point is that it is irresponsible to be running so lean that their entire system is tightly coupled like this, and we need to make doing so completely unprofitable to airlines.
The way I read it, you kind of are, just without saying it out loud:
> we could just make airlines always liable for any situation where they fail to get you to where they said they were going to get you by when they said they were going to get you. Like literally any service that is not delivered as promised.
What incentives does that set up when terrible (or even questionable) weather exists at the departure or destination airports or widespread en route?
There are, but more importantly, as critical infrastructure you should have to demonstrate a BCDR (business continuity disaster recovery) plan exists and that you can perform it from a cold start and under extreme system stress.
I have to imagine that they are bleeding money from this self inflicted wound. How would fines have helped if the threat of total chaos and huge losses didn't do it?
This is a pretty huge incentive to get it right, and you can be sure every other airline will be looking into how they can prevent something similar from happening to them over the next few months.
