Tuesday, she came back with a rainbow-colored bag filled with snacks and other necessities to give out. Contact Center experienced record call volume, and we continue to see sustained demand for bookings, reservation modifications and one-way rentals,” he said in a statement.Ĭollier, who missed Christmas with her grandkids, returned to Midway Monday for an update and found people sleeping at the airport. The holiday season is always busy for Hertz, but the rental car agency is seeing a surge in demand for car rentals nationwide and in Chicago because of the recent winter storms and flight cancellations, spokesman Jonathan Stern said. Long lines snaked through a Hertz rental car location in the Loop. Other travelers also said they were struggling to rebook their travel, whether by plane, train or car. “Now, we’re just stuck here for five days in a city that I know no one, nothing.” “I would have preferred to have been canceled in Phoenix and then been home,” Day said. Neither she nor her daughters, who were dressed in sweatpants and red long-sleeved Christmas shirts, have coats or winter attire as the city recovers from a sharp cold spell. She said Southwest employees were doing the best they could, but she was frustrated the airline let the family fly into Chicago at all. But now she can’t retrieve her family’s luggage, she said, after Southwest employees told her it would be flown to Albany without them. Her dad was visiting family in Ohio, and began making a five-hour drive to Chicago to figure out next steps. And Southwest’s customer service phone system was down, she said. Rebooking on another airline could cost more than $1,000 per ticket. ![]() ![]() 2, she said.Īmtrak was full and rental cars were hard to come by, she said. To fly back home to Phoenix, they were told they will have to wait until Jan. She said Southwest has now told her family the first opening for a flight to New York is Friday. Southwest canceled their flight to Albany and rebooked them for Tuesday, then later canceled the Tuesday flight. He said that after trying to fly a full schedule across the holiday weekend, executives decided to cut flying in the coming days to try to catch up and get people and airplanes back into place.ĭay, who is five months pregnant, and her kids, ages 7 and 5, arrived in Chicago Monday. In a video posted online Tuesday evening, Southwest CEO Bob Jordan apologized to customers and employees. Flight canceled? Experts share some advice about what to do. The problem for customers will be finding space on increasingly full flights, especially when only a fraction of those flights are expected to be operating for the next several days. Moving airplanes back into the right place can be done in a few days, Mann said. “I think some of this was a self-created problem,” he said. Industry analyst Robert Mann said the scheduling technology issue was the last in a series of events that contributed to the cancellations, including increasing reliance on mandatory overtime for staffers to meet the flight schedule. Southwest flies a point-to-point network, meaning that crews can be scheduled to fly, for example, from an East Coast city to the Midwest and on to the Rocky Mountains or the West Coast, rather than flying in and out of a major hub city under a hub-and-spoke system.Ī Southwest Airlines employee helps Sam Acuna find his family’s luggage from among the hundreds of bags separated from their owners by major Southwest Airlines service interruptions at Midway Airport on Dec. The union that represents the airline’s pilots, the Southwest Airlines Pilots Association, attributed the continued cancellations largely to the airline’s scheduling technology.Īs the weather worsened, the technology couldn’t keep track of pilots, flight attendants or planes, said Mike Santoro, vice president of the association, which is in negotiations with Southwest over a new contract. I also urge the leadership of Southwest to be proactive in communicating openly and honestly with their customers about the rebooking of future flights and what the airline will be able to handle in the days and weeks ahead.” “All travelers must be compensated for invaluable loss of time this holiday season, on top of compensation for rescheduled flights, hotels and alternative transportation. “Southwest Airlines should take immediate action to assist all those that are stranded and waiting endless hours for their flights,” Pritzker said. Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg. Pritzker, who said on Twitter Tuesday he was following the cancellations and had spoken with U.S. ![]() Department of Transportation announced Monday evening it was looking at the “unacceptable” level of disruption for Southwest customers and that it sought to ensure the airline was sticking to its obligations to stranded customers. The Southwest cancellations drew the attention of federal authorities.
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