Southwest Airlines lands $140M fine for that Christmas IT meltdown The US Department of Transportation has, on paper at least, fined Southwest Airlines $140 million in addition to refunds the government strong-armed the biz to pay out, as a result of the budget airline's massive Christmas outage last year. It was nearly a year ago to the day that a massive winter storm forced Southwest to …
No kidding. Customers pissed off, never to travel on Southwest again. Stock losses & market losses. "Hey, let's kick them in the financial nuts while they are down."
Oh, and write the check to the government treasury. No doubt giving money to the government will make it up to all the stranded travelers. I know I would be thrilled to be stranded in an airport for a few days if it means the government gets a payday.
So, as a traveler last year that was supposed to be arriving before Christmas to spend with immediate family, my family of 4 can honestly say that this whole situation absolutely SUCKED.
We were called ahead saying, we've rescheduled your flight for tomorrow (Christmas Eve).
We then arrived, sat at the gate, saw the plane appear, no pilots or crew arrived. We then waited longer, and then they cancelled the flight.
In line wating, started searching for other flights. At SW counter was told, "we can get you there 3 days after Christmas". Fortunately Delta got us to our destination on Christmas Day -- albeit we arrived just before midnight Christmas and weren't to our destination until the following day.
We DID get refunds for SW flights, plus paid for the Delta flights, plus 25000 miles per seat.
We were NOT refunded for the rides to and from the airport the day we didn't fly, not paid out for the meal consumed in the airport that day. We were NOT paid out for extra hotel expenses, show expenses, etc. that all had to be rebooked because of changing dates. That was disappointing.
That said, the flights home (on NYE day) went off without a hitch.
Needless to say, we are NOT traveling by plane this holiday season.
jeff
We had a similar experience: the first warning sign was when were informed of *two* flight changes the day before our flight. We were going from Sacramento to San Diego, but got changed to Sacramento to Burbank, then back to Oakland, and then to San Diego. The next warning sign was we sat on the plane in Sac for over an hour before even pushing back from the gate. When we got to Burbank, it was an unholy mess. We talked to a pilot that was waiting for a plane and he told us it was highly unlikely that the flight was actually going to happen, so we decided to rent a car and drive. My wife immediately reserved a car online (which she does at least once a week for her work) but when we got to the car rental counter, they laughed and said there were no cars. We ended up taking an Uber from Burbank to San Diego, which cost almost $500.
We got to San Diego with the clothes on our back. Attempts to contact SouthWest about our luggage were hopeless, so we bought stuff locally in order to get by.
For the trip home 3 days later, we were notified the flight was cancelled, and we couldn't get ahold of anyone about scheduling a new one. There weren't any flights available on other airlines, either. Luckily my BIL had a car he was selling, so I made a deal that I would handle getting the car cleaned up and sold in exchange for letting us drive it home.
Our luggage was finally delivered to our home on January 5th via FedEx.
SouthWest eventually reimbursed us for the clothes and stuff we had to buy, and for the Uber trip.
Per the DoT, Southwest's total bill for the meltdown has amounted to more than $750 million.
That's good, but I'd be more inclined to believe they'd learned a lesson if those responsible had been fired rather than (as reported earlier in the Reg) promoted.
I used Southwest once, many years ago, and vowed to never do so again, so I wasn't personally inconvenienced by this massive display of incompetence, but I know many people were.
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