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Southwest Airlines customers still recovering from holiday flight cancellations
Some customers say they are still recovering after dealing with delayed and canceled flights over the holidays as Southwest Airlines says they’re still working to clean up the mess from the operational failure. FOX 7 Austin's Meredith Aldis has more.
AUSTIN, Texas - Some Southwest Airlines customers are still recovering after dealing with delayed and canceled flights over the holidays. Southwest Airlines says they’re still working to clean up the mess from the operational failure.
"We are still recovering, believe it or not, it was traumatic," Kathleen Schwenning said.
Kathleen and Jim Schwenning were trying to fly from Pittsburg to California to see their son for Christmas.
"No flights getting out of there," Jim Schwenning said.
They didn’t even make it halfway. They got stuck in Austin for seven days.
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Southwest Airlines chaos: Family snags one of last rental cars to drive home after canceled flight
More than 55 percent, or 123 Southwest flights, in Austin were canceled Wednesday.
"We could have rented a car and drove to California, would have taken 20 hours, but we’re like no, we’ll get on the next one and then that would get cancelled and you just kept having hope, like this couldn’t keep occurring," Kathleen Schwenning said.
They said the first day they were given a hotel voucher, but then Southwest stopped handing those out, so they paid out of pocket. They also didn’t have their luggage.
"We had to get a change of clothes, underwear, pajamas, because we had been in the same clothes for four days," Kathleen Schwenning said.
Finally, they were able to fly standby on December 29th and made it to California with their luggage waiting for them.
"It helped in the fact that we had our valuables, our medicine, our clothes, that in itself was comforting to have your suitcase, which is crazy to think just a suitcase brought you comfort," Kathleen Schwenning said.
"There were so many people that couldn’t find their luggage. We were fortunate to be able to find ours," Jim Schwenning said.
Southwest Airlines said they’ve returned almost all of the luggage and are processing tens of thousands of reimbursement requests a day for meals, hotel accommodations, and alternate transportation. The Schwenning said they plan to submit theirs totaling about $800.
"We’ll see if they stand behind their reimbursements, you can check in with us and we’ll let you know how we feel about Southwest once we get our email off," Kathleen Schwenning said.
Because of the operational disruptions and almost 17,000 flights canceled in a span of 10 days, Southwest Airlines is expecting a net loss in the fourth quarter 2022 of up to $825 million.
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USDOT to examine Southwest Airlines as flight cancelations continue
Southwest Airlines said they’re working to recover operations after consecutive days of extreme winter weather. They also said they’ve decided to reduce their schedule by flying roughly a third of their schedule for the next several days.
To help prevent this from happening again, Southwest Airlines CEO Bob Jordan said they’re allocating more than $1 billion to upgrade its IT systems.
"We've already taken immediate actions to mitigate the risk of this ever happening again, and the review work will inform additional actions and investment as well," Jordan said.
Southwest Airlines is offering bonus rapid rewards points for people impacted. If you need to claim those or file for a reimbursement, or still need to get your luggage, click here.
The Schwennings said they don’t plan on flying again for a while.