What?! I hadn’t heard about any forthcoming announcement!
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Does anyone else do their monthly surveys? There was a survey about the new class and options for it a while back. I don’t remember any really special benefits that are not already offered.
I don’t remember ever getting a survey. I’ll keep a lookout for one in the future though. I have a lot to say.
With all of the cancellations over the last week, how has SW done? I’ve heard a lot about Delta Airlines and United Airlines, but nothing about SW. Isn’t there a website that tracks changes and cancellations?
I signed up for the Southwest Customer Advisory Panel years ago. Monthly they ask what airlines you have flown. Over the years they have asked about family boarding, credit card benefits, how people feel about Covid protocols. There have been a couple of surveys that I have said “if you do this I will never fly your airline again”.
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Good for you.
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I used to flip back and forth between SW or JetBlue, whichever was cheaper. But my anxiety with the boarding process always has me figuring in the Early Bird into the pricing and lately, doing so has made JetBlue cheaper every time. Plus, with my JetBlue card, I have been racking up the points and I get the free checked bags.
For me, the airlines can have any class they want, any destination they want, and any amount of layovers they want…so long as they announce all in advance and its not like watching someone spin a wheel on a gameshow to see if the flight you paid for is the flight you end up actually getting.
Don’t be filling your schedule with “Direct flights” and then a month before departure change those flights to various connecting flights. The only time that should be happening is if a storm is causing problems. I shouldn’t have my blood run ice cold when I see an email coming from the Airline on my phone. I should be getting excited for my trip, not wondering “Great, NOW what?”
Same with departure times. Once you announce them, you stick with them. We chose American because it was the earlier direct flight for the upcoming trip and it was to leave at 6:30AM (and because SW has been getting more and more squirrely). About 3 weeks later after I paid for everything, it changed to 7:45AM departure. WHY?
As it is THEY who set their schedules, there should be no reason there are any regular changes outside of inclement weather. They know their staffing ability, they know their destinations, and they know the amount of passengers…why are they acting like they have no idea if they can pull off flights from one place to another MONTHS in advance? The whole thing reminds me of Liners choosing ADRs. We gobble up a bunch and start whittling down as our plans solidify. That’s…now how any of this is supposed to work!
EDIT: and IF it turns out the flights they scheduled end up having almost no one on: Welp, that’s an airline problem, not mine. Next time, do the scheduling better. Why do I have to suffer your mistake? This is basic management stuff, on what has become mass transit in the world; why are they acting like flying is a new thing that all the kinks haven’t been ironed out yet?
Thanks for coming to my Ted Talk.
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Sounds like i need to do some AA advatage homework. Just one more thing i will need to learn before we go on our disney vaca next year.
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I did actually message SW to express my feelings on the lack of direct flights. They did respond. Basically saying we create our schedules according to demand and can not say if more direct flights will or will not come back to PHL in the future. But they hope I will continue to fly SW in the future. Ummm, no direct flights means no SW flying for me sorry. Rarely do I do a Sat to Sat and that is the only way to get round trip direct flights at the moment. As far as demand goes I have never seen a direct flight out of PHL to MCO be anything less than completely full…even during the early parts of reopening. I find that hard to believe.
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What a load of crap they’re trying to shovel.
Absolutely agreed: Before covid, nearly EVERY direct flight out of PHL, and there were several, was booked solid. Saying that there isn’t demand is straight up lying.
Another nail in the SW coffin.
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I will send an email as well. I feel like it is an exercise in futility, but will make the attempt.
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Agree. Really didnt think anything would come from my complaint but I also feel that they do need to know when thier most valuble customers are dissatisfied.
Your contract of carriage specifies the airline must deliver transport between your chosen origin and chosen destination on your chosen date, and there’s flexibility built-in on the date. Everything else is at the discretion of the airline
Everything about air travel is expensive. It’s capital intensive in that it requires a great deal of expensive equipment that needs regular service with parts that have exactly one supplier. It’s labor intensive in that it needs vast numbers of skilled people, who must be available to perform their assigned tasks, or the aircraft don’t fly. Even though contemporary aircraft are much more fuel-efficient, aviation is still energy-intense, and demand for fuel is inelastic with price. The cost of flying a given aircraft per flight hour changes only marginally whether or not the aircraft is full or empty. Fuel use doesn’t change that much, and the size of the crew is based on capacity, not actual number of passengers. Aircraft also make no money sitting on the ground.
It’s kind of a miracle that airlines ever made money at all. Most of them in the history of commercial aviation made shockingly little money, which is why most eventually go bust. In fact, domestic airlines lose money on actual flying. What profitability they do have comes from add-on fees and, moreso, from selling miles to credit card loyalty programs.
So, unless there are regulations forbidding it - and there are precious few that do - airlines are going to be relentless in combining partially-full flights so that absolutely every seat is full. Chances are your example of a flight that moved from 6:30 to 7:45 was the result of combining flights at 6:30 and 9:30+/-, so that the “new” 7:45 flight is at capacity. Flight crews don’t get paid until the aircraft door closes, so it costs the airline nothing to de-schedule the now-redundant crew.
Is this bad customer service? Absolutely. But that’s the result of paying what amounts to bus fare for a service that’s orders of magnitude more expensive to deliver.
In the 1970 film Airport, a passenger on the Chicago-Rome flight at the center of the story makes a crack about expecting better service “for $450.” That’s $3220 in today’s dollars. What’s the ballpark cost of a round-trip Chicago-Rome flight today? $500. In constant-dollar terms about 1/6 the cost of 50 years ago. That’s got to come from somewhere. So long as year-over-year record numbers of people are flying, and the leisure travel market remains almost comically price-sensitive, service is going to go out the window.
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Only direct flight from MSY to MCO are Spirit (no!), Frontier (4 per week, havent tried yet) and SW (does 3 per day). I will go SW and cross my fingers. Before Covid they were very consistent with flights. Since Covid, only went once MSY to MCO SW non stop and back, both stayed on schedule and flight was pleasant. The FAs really make the flight nice on SW, IMO.
Edit: also very reasonable, $150-$300 round trip, pp.
And this is where it becomes more than okay for us, as consumers, to demand better or go elsewhere.
I see everything that you’re saying, but I also don’t believe that they can’t do better at managing their expected v actual passenger count so as to create schedules that are more conducive to managing the bottom line efficiently without disrupting passenger experience.
The thing is, their effing with the schedule has consequences to passengers far beyond the inconvenience of the time change. I know of one person who, when the airline cancelled their flight and they were going to miss an important “event” we’ll call it, opted instead to hire a car to the ridiculous tune of well over $1000 smackaroos. Because spending that was less impactful to them than the cost of missing the “event”. And it just shouldn’t be this way.
I myself faced car rental fee changes resulting from a SW schedule change that I had nothing to do with. Why should I be forced to deal with that? I bought something from SW, I made plans accordingly, and when SW effed up I had to pay more??? Not okay
Start with a lesser schedule. Expand it to ADD flights as it becomes necessary. Don’t sell this wacky ridiculous wide-open schedule hoping to fill it and then eff with people’s actual real lives when you can’t sell it.
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This! 100%. Why, oh why, haven’t the airlines figures this out! Start with the most popular times and add in as needed. I’m sure its more complex then this but, if done far enough in advance I think these airlines can figure it out.
This is a complete non-starter. In order to have the capacity to scale up, the airline would need to have some number of aircraft sitting idle and some number of crews waiting for assignments.
In the case of the former, that means either interest or lease payments on $100 million (the rough cost of a new 737-MAX8 or A320) that’s doing nothing, possibly for days at a time. For the latter, it’s essentially asking flight crews to work for what amounts to part-time money. The former will lead to massive shirt loss for the airline and the latter to crews who will go elsewhere for more hours.
OK, so what if there was an airline that said, in exchange for a 20% higher fare, flights would never be combined, and to the maximum extent possible, flights wouldn’t be cancelled except for weather or force majeure event? I believe the number of people choosing that airline for vacation travel would be between “slim” and “none.”
One doesn’t need to even go outside of Forum to see how aggressively people chase even small differences in fares. I don’t mean if a fare for the same flight goes down for some reason; one would be foolish not to seek the partial refund. I mean actually paying more than a marginal difference to have the assurance that the airline would have the standby resources to prevent these brownouts.
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These two things pull in opposite directions. Our only real power, such as it is, in a consumerist society, is to not consume in response to shoddy goods or poor service. That’s supposed to be the whole magic of the market™ (excuse me while I crack a rib laughing). But if we reward bad behavior, there is no incentive to change.
Seems like this would be a really effective application of - gasp - regulation. But that’s Bolshevism run amok so we can’t have that.