Southwest Airlines’ Holiday Meltdown Brings on Federal Investigation
TX – Dallas-based Southwest Airlines faces a federal investigation into whether it violated its own legally required customer service plan amid a blizzard of flight cancellations that ruined plans and angered travelers over the Christmas holiday. In a statement late Monday, officials at the U.S. Department of Transportation called the service meltdown, which resulted in the cancellation or delay of most of the carrier’s flights over the holiday weekend, “disproportionate and unacceptable.” As Winter Storm Elliott started to wreak havoc on a large chunk of the U.S., most canceled flights across the nation were operated by Southwest Airlines. And air travelers’ woes are likely to continue this week.
“USDOT is concerned by Southwest’s unacceptable rate of cancellations and delays & reports of lack of prompt customer service,” the agency posted on Twitter on Monday evening. “The Department will examine whether cancellations were controllable and if Southwest is complying with its customer service plan.”
Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg tweeted shortly after that he was “tracking [the issue] closely” and would have more to say about this Tuesday. Late Tuesday afternoon, the DOT (Department of Transportation) said on Twitter that Buttigieg had spoken “with union leaders and the CEO of Southwest Airlines to convey the Department’s expectation that Southwest meet its obligations to passengers and workers and take steps to prevent a situation like this from happening again.” Southwest officials said in a message to employees, obtained by the Dallas Morning News on Tuesday, that staffing issues were a large part of the reason the planes were being grounded after pilots and other staff could not get to the airports where they were needed.
Some travelers were told that no new bookings were being made before the new year. In a statement to The Dallas Morning News, a spokesperson for the airline — the largest in 23 of the nation’s top 25 travel markets — said that it was slashing flights and halting ticket sales for the coming days while it recovers. “Due to our limited schedule and large number of re-accommodations, inventory available to book flights across our network is very low, but we are still operating flights,” Southwest spokesperson Chris Perry said in a statement.
Mike Santoro, vice president of the pilot’s union for the airline, told CNN the core of the issue was an outdated scheduling system that was already overwhelmed before the storm became the catalyst for the current problems. Those technology problems, he said, have left pilots and crews stranded in cities across the country looking for accommodations, unable to get through to airline officials to find out where they — or the planes they are scheduled to staff — are supposed to be.