Southwest cancels 5,400 flights in less than 48 hours
npr.org
npr.org
Here are some crazy things I have encountered.
Rental cars in our city are sold out. Same for cities within two hours drive. The websites will accept reservations, but when you show up, they tell you they have no cars. Because it's the holidays, busses and trains are booked and any flights on other airlines are crazy expensive ($1500 one way). When you are stuck in a city, you are probably truly stuck there.
Your only hope of dealing with SWA is waiting in line at check-in or a gate. The phones don't work. Online chat doesn't work. The lines are long and slow.
Luggage is hit or miss. If your bag was pulled off a plane, you might find it in baggage claim, but most bags are on a plane or on the tarmac. SWA told us it may be 30 days until we get our luggage. They won't pull bags for people, and the agents that we spoke with acknowledged and felt for people who may have had medicine in them.
The workers are as befuddled as the passengers. They have been very nice and as helpful as they can be, but their phones haven't been working and their computer systems have been slow.
On Twitter, someone posted a video of the announcement at Houston Hobby about no flights until the 31st and people keeping their receipts for hotels, etc. They said the same thing at our airport.
People in the airport are so mad. It's unfortunate because it's not constructive. But tempers are flaring, and frustrated passengers who finally get to talk to an agent end up slowing things down because they spend a lot of time trying to hear something they're not going to hear.
Ultimately, this is an operations failure. Companies talk a lot about accountability, but the typical way you hold people accountable is by replacing them with more capable people. It will be very interesting to see if any executives leave SWA over this. If not, I would say that no one was held accountable.
To close, my family and I are fine. This is but a minor speed bump in life. No one is dying, and we will see how SWA takes care of the extra expenditures. Some people aren't so lucky. They have meds in bags, or finances that don't allow them to spend multiple nights in a hotel and get Uber trips for a few days. Hopefully, SWA takes care of them, too.
This has been procedure for the last 40 years.
There is no excuse that is feasable or plausible for 'forgetting' important medications in the checked baggage.
This is a reading comprehension problem and not an airline issue.
You have never forgotten to pack something, or perhaps forgotten an important detail in a stressful situation?
And usually not in a city other than your point of departure or expected arrival.
Southwest should be responsible for making it worse.
Keep it on your person. Always.
https://www.southwest.com/help/accessible-travel-assistance/...
Regardless - don't check anything you aren't prepared to say goodbye to.
But also I've traveled for a month (us to India) from my backpack. One week of clothes, a laptop, some cables, notebook and pens, perhaps a couple more books, a few toiletries. And still some room for one 'fun' thing, like a small synthesizer to jam on.
It's a bit like ultralight backpacking; you can cut down quite a lot one you get in the mindset. I definitely don't claim it works for everyone... But probably most people can travel rather lighter than they normally do.
Fwiw, my travel backpack is pretty similar to this one. Definitely a bit bigger than the standard backpack, much smaller than a hiking backpack, and rather smaller than a roller bag.
https://www.chromeindustries.com/product/hondo-backpack/BG-2...
I can’t say I recommend then offering to shove everyone else in the back.
This has been one of the reasons I heavily lean toward direct flights now - that way if stranded im either at home or my destination.
There’s also greyhound and Amtrak.
The car had 2 girls in it who hotboxed the car the entire 6 hour drive, then missed his exit near San Jose and got pulled over for an unrelated reason.
Says if he wasn't married now he would do it again in a heartbeat.
https://twitter.com/flyingtigress/status/1607739070687371268
Who can step in to make some baseline rules that corporations have to abide by so people aren't screwed like this?
Casual reminder to keep all medicine in your carry-on! Even gate-checked bags get delayed and lost. I never realized that could happen with a gate-check until it happened to me. They loaded all of the gate-checked bags onto our plane, but then that put it over a weight limit, so they took a pallet or two of them off and put them on another flight. Of course, it was a complicated multi-leg international flight to boot.
They jump around the country, much less frequently going back to a hub as other airlines do. That means that the planes and crews have a relatively harder time recovering from system-wide disasters because they don't have as part of normal operations as much ability to centralize or pool resources and get people/planes reorganized. (everyone go back to base, consolidate passengers, crew, planes and redeploy them and sort things out in one place)
Unfortunate, but that's their model. Good for some purposes, not so good for others. Maybe it's them being quirky and an active choice. I mean, up until a few years ago they did not fly to Hawaii because their scheduling system / people / processes did not want to have redeye flights.
It must really help all the employees with routine and consistency even if it’s not optimal.
The planes are scheduled that way, but the people won't stay for the entire plane's cycle.
That said, I flew Southwest from SJC to LAS for CES one year, connecting in SAN. Weather wasn't great, and they'd put you on the next available flight with an empty seat. They were even able to shuffle people without going up to the podium. Legacy carriers would have drug their feet, there'd be a line, and they'd charge for the privilege of changing flights.
Maybe not 1:1 for what you're describing, but it solution/reason, but does seem like a possible sign that they're investing in proactive tools.
Delta does this well too. Haven’t heard many good things about American.
If I’ve had a missed connection en route, I’ll generally land and the app tells me what they’ve already rebooked me onto, but I have a choice of many different alternatives (usually) and can pick among them without cost and without waiting in a call queue.
Stuck on the tarmac in the snow and miss the connecting flight (last of the day)? They automatically rebooked me on another airline and I got a notification from the app as soon as I had reception.
3+ SFO bound flights delayed at JFK because of crazy winds at SFO? They proactively encouraged people to rebook, gratis. I rebooked on a flight the next day on nicer equipment, through the app, went into town, grabbed some bagels and had a flight at a nearly ideal time of day.
Regional plane goes tech? They had a red coat out and about keeping everyone informed.
Missed a flight because I misread the departure time? They sold me a same day ticket on the next flight at a hefty discount and I kept the inbound leg.
Southwest has a huge disadvantage and it's not tech: it's the lack of interline agreements. Nearly every other airline (except perhaps Spirit) can rebook you on another carrier when things go sideways. Southwest simply can't. With an interline agreement in place you'd have far fewer people getting stuck with exorbitant last minute fares.
In general though don't fly when you're getting unusual weather. Less than an inch of snow at PDX throws everything into chaos (and Portlanders call it fucking snowpocalypse). A few inches of snow at PWM and they don't even blink.
I should also add that a few years back when my Southwest flight out of SFO got cancelled I was able to book a seat on a flight out of OAK with a minimum of effort. I think I had to pay the difference in fare though. When it works, it works, but the go it alone attitude will only take you so far.
AA live chat said they couldn’t help (other than rebooking 2 days later which would be pointless) but when I called they were able to drop the connection inbound and outbound so I could drive to the hub city airport (cost me like 2 hours each way, nbd).
They fixed it in like 3 minutes on the phone but it seems like they have to do it in a super hacky way because I had to check in at the airport which was no fun with long holiday lines.
Consider: when a flight is delayed for a repair (maintenance delay) does that equal "not enough aircraft"?
Carriers can't staff surplus crews any more than they can sit on spare aircraft, both which are small, very carefully computed quantities.
It is a crew rest requirement delay.
It was super convenient even if I was fuming over the multiple hours delay.
I'd look at it the other way around: cancelling is so annoying for them that they're often the last ones to do it (barring catastrophic collapse, of course).
When I was traveling weekly out of Chicago, I always made sure to bring my Southwest credit card, just in case. Southwest sucks, but it gets you home.
My sister was recently stranded in DFW trying to make it to SFO when American Airlines canceled her flight. They were happy to substitute another flight... to Sacramento.
So the two-hour round trip to pick her up from SFO turned into an eight-hour round trip to Sacramento. I'm amazed this was considered an acceptable substitute. Would have been nice if American was willing to get you home in the event of canceled flights.
(We could see available seats on flights from DFW to SFO at that time from Delta and Alaska. But those seats were "not available to American rebooking agents". It seems like that should have been American's problem, not ours.)
Footnote: even though my sister had to be rebooked onto the American flight to Sacramento, American didn't bother rerouting her luggage, which they sent to SFO. I guess canceling the flight meant "the plane will still fly, but without passengers".
I realize that this was inconvenient and a big hassle, so I don't want to make light of it, but something seems off with the geography.
- You need to allow for a wider margin of error in predicting travel times, which means leaving earlier than strictly necessary. But leaving early doesn't mean getting back early; you have to wait for the plane to debark.
- This trip was long enough to be more demanding than an electric car could handle, requiring 30 minutes of time spent parked and charging the car.
- More time was wasted waiting for the luggage to show up; we were not informed that it hadn't been sent.
The Box ( https://www.amazon.com/Box-Shipping-Container-Smaller-Econom... ) has some interesting things to say about this.
In that book, the ordinary logistical setup is that ships tend to cover individual transit routes, which means that a delay affecting one ship doesn't spread through the system. Malcom McLean tries to set up a system of ships that always sail east instead, and it fails very badly, because delays on each individual leg of the (infinitely long!) route accumulate instead of happening and then fading away.
I see lots of people who are at least quite a bit less likely to use them in the future (and they are still in the middle of trying to fix it).
Meh, everybody always says that. In six months when this is a distant memory… it will be business as usual.
For me (I am affected), this is actually another in a series of recent events that are making me reconsider my preference for SWA. They are no longer a "cheap" airline, routinely more expensive than the other major carriers. Their planes are not nice anymore. I've flown on a few other airlines over the past few years and found their planes to be nicer with more features (like chargers and phone/tablet holders). And now this. The cancellations are one thing, but they totally botched the communication of it, and their practice of delaying flights throughout the day only to cancel half of them after several hours left people stranded.
Will I stop using them? We'll see how they respond, but they may not be my first choice anymore.
https://blog.autoslash.com/secrets-to-getting-a-cheap-deal-o...
I just laugh at the upset attempts when you go to check in online: “get priority boarding and 2 inches of legroom for only an extra 50% on top of the ticket price.” I really don’t see much evidence that there was actually a race to the bottom. And I certainly won’t blame consumer preferences when I don’t see any options for slightly better service for slightly more money.
Boston to Las Vegas, Orlando, or San Francisco, I’ve got a wide variety of choices, 2-4 carriers flying more than that non-stops per day.
Flying from Des Moines to Presque Isle, Maine, I have only a bunch of 2 and 3 stops on United.
BOS has the "advantage" of serving a fairly large population while also not being big enough to be a real hub for anyone[0], while being simultaneously big enough to have service from nearly everyone.
Unlike a lot of airports smaller or serving fewer people than BOS (and some of comparable size), you can get from BOS to a whole mess of hubs.
A few select routes (BOS to SFO as noted) are incredibly well-served because of the volume of lucrative business travel between the two and the fact that a whole mess of airlines already serve both airports.
[0] No, JetBlue doesn't count. Boston is as much a hub for them as CLE[1] was for Continental. I.e. a second class hub at best.
[1] CLE by comparison only really serves Cleveland. Columbus, Dayton, Cinci, Indy, Pittsburgh and probably a few others from a similar radius BOS draws from all have decent(ish) airports. All of those have basically the same problem as CLE or are worse in some way. I've flown through or into and out of all of them.
But for the 329,925,000 other Americans, many of whom have a long history and belief in Southwest’s reputation for customer service and fair policies? They will have forgotten by next week.
Is Southwest the lone primary carrier for many of their airports?
SWA is generally one of the bigger users of any particular airport they use as SWA tends to avoid the "primary tier" hub airports.
SWA examples: Providence or Nashua, not Boston. Houston Hobby--not Intergalactic. Chicago Midway not O'Hare. San Jose rather than San Francisco. etc.
i would imagine that's especially vulnerable to disruption as any delay/issue is magnified throughout the rest of the flights.
https://www.southwest.com/help/changes-and-cancellations/ove...
The effect is the same either way. Someone paid for a ticket and they don't get to board the plane.
The airline sold you something that they can't deliver because they refuse to keep extra planes around. They refuse to keep extra planes around because that would eat into profits, and would mean their execs wouldn't be able to buy their third gold-plated yachts.
Another way to think of it is what could an airline have reasonably done to avoid the situation? If it's overbooking, the reasonable thing is to not overbook. If it's overselling, they could choose not to fully book their scheduled equipment, but is that reasonable? They can't choose to have 100% reliable planes and crews and weather and ground operations. Stuff happens, and it's certainly reasonable to be upset when it does, but understanding why it happened can be helpful, so making a distinction between overbooking and overselling makes sense to me.
Seatguru says [1] southwest flies three variants, 737-700 with 143 seats and 737-800 and 737-Max 8 both with 175 seats.
If a -700 gets substituted in, that's a lot of missing seats. I've also flown on planes where one seat is out of service for whatever reason and usually has a plastic cover on it.
[1] https://seatguru.com/airlines/Southwest_Airlines/information...
> They're legally protected when doing this, and it's why that
> doctor got dragged off that flight.
This is definitely their fault, but nothing like United pulling the doctor off the plane
The bottom line here is that the hub-and-spoke model is more resilient than the point-to-point model.
It’s the only thing that explains why Southwest was uniquely impacted this week. Every other airline has staff issues, and the same weather to deal with.
With a point to point network, the coordination problem is much larger than with a hub and spoke network. That is probably what pushed Southwest’s software over the limit. But remember, the software didn’t fail by itself in a vacuum. Resiliency problems during a weather event were the root cause.
..And the one thing that might have saved Southwest in the past, its ferocious employee loyalty and willingness to go several extra miles when the shit hit the fan because they knew they were being taken care of, has been utterly destroyed by the new management.
People were loyal to Herb (not SWA) because Herb was loyal to them. Herb’s gone, loyalty’s gone.
It was a pain so much I stopped flying them. I’d buy a ticket and have to babysit it so that a flight from noon to 6pm didn’t morph over several changes into a multi stop marathon from 8am to 9pm…..
SWA can do this bc they operate a single aircraft type (737), have lower opex (they operate closer to spirit than delta internally and they do things like not allowing full GDS access to force leisure travelers to book through their website), and they keep their aircraft around a while. they also have a smaller network than the bigger airlines do, which further lowers opex.
However, SWA isn't truly point to point seeing as how a lot of their traffic flows through Chicago (MDW), Dallas (DAL) and Houston (HOU) and they have huge hangars and service ops out of these locations.
hubs aren't immune to huge cancellation numbers like this. American and United were heavily impacted during the 2021 Winter storm. Had the storm happened during the busiest peak travel season of the year like it did this year, they would have had record cancellations as well.
https://www.dallasnews.com/business/local-companies/2016/08/...
at the time, then-CEO now-chairman Gary Kelly said:
> "What's unique is the partial failure, it's never happened," he said. "This isn't a drill you can run."
https://web.archive.org/web/20161112192103/http://www.dallas...
Delta had a similar outage due to a datacenter fire, grounding all domestic flights. Southwest was uniquely slow in taking days to start up again. And if the way my American Airlines ticket switched my birthdate to January 1st, 2000 is any indication, many airlines still need to modernize.
I think you've mistaken this for something immediately increases quarterly gains with no regard to long-term strategy.
And you can guess what their managers' response typically is: "We need to focus on OKRs and QBRs and KPIs right now... maybe next quarter"
I'm fully convinced that achieving 'manager status' is directly correlated to cowardice. Companies need top-down decision-making, but those decision-makers need to spend more time on the front line.
This is not rewarded so it doesn't happen. Managers are rewarded for line goes up so they only focus on line goes up. If line ever doesn't go up it costs them money (advancement, compensation) even if there's little they could have done to make line go up.
Market forces can correct here. Vote with your wallet.
It used to be that my first priority would be to go into the terminal and try to talk to somebody. I figured they were the experts. From what I've read, the staff use an antiquated system that takes you from one airport to another, then they can try to get you from that city to where you want to go. That's why there's so much tapping of keys and why it takes so long.
It's better to present them with a route that you've found on Google Flights or similar. The Southwest first flight out was supposed to be yesterday evening, the day after Christmas. In our case, the only thing we could find before Christmas was getting us from SJC to Seattle via Phoenix on Alaska. We ended up renting a car and driving home to Portland. Things got bad around Eugene - I stopped counting after 40 wrecked cars and semis - and got worse as you got closer to Portland.
See any gains here?
If you have a black swan event like this and you listened to your solutions architect you will have a disaster recovery plan or even better a multi region setup. Worst case you have highly paid support engineers at the cloud providers who will do everything they can to get you back online.
That's not the article I hoped to find however. I seem to remember there was another article where they hired a investigator/consultant to figure out the price to migrate to the cloud and ensure "this never happens again."
My recollection of that was: their scheduling/ops team is also in the same city (Atlanta GA) as this datacenter, and that teams work was brought to a halt by the datacenter outage. The investigator concluded that Delta would need redundant copies of the ops team or the whole effort of moving the software to the cloud would just be at risk to something happening to the human team all in the same city. That would obviously cost to much money, so Delta decided to skip it.
Source: Am a local who's been headhunted by them a few times but never got beyond the initial discussion with the headhunter for this reason.
Amadeus are eating them up, because their airline backend system is a shared multi-tenant setup, built on commodity hardware. Their distribution system used to be mainframes, but they managed to migrate away in the 2010s.
Sabre is still alive, but only in North America, and Amadeus is slowly chipping away (WN, AC..)
When we first started doing it the datacenter would be chosen months in advance so that teams would have plenty of time to ensure their services can run without that specific datacenter.
When I left this year, the datacenter would be randomly chosen on the same day it would be cut off.
You can't really do hot spares for people without time to gear/train up and the weather event is so widespread I doubt there's enough spare SWA human capacity across the whole nation even if you had C130s on standby everywhere ready to take workers where they're needed most. From a national security perspective, situations like this is why the Marines exist right? Ensure a rapid response while the rest of the machine gets moving. I feel bad for everyone involved, those affected and those trying to figure out a solution.
Management could consider how pay and performance programs can help ensure business continuity.
HR and MBA xls wizards don't understand how to manage for business longevity.
/s
It seems you're discounting just how complex HR can be, especially in the face of exigent circumstances. No amount of bonuses will immediately staff up an entire terminal in the face of a massive snowstorm.
That is right and thus I would engage line management to figure out business continuity.
> in the face of a massive snowstorm.
It is winter. The storm was tough but not exceptional for the season of winter. Denver did not report tremendous amounts of snow.
Few if any MBAs can get on the ramp and look a line employee in the eye and lend a hand. The wfh keyboard warriors don't know blue collar and therefore are unable to figure this out. MBAs can figure out ways to game their pay. HR can recommend team building 'fun' and non-revenue standby seats, which have minimal value to those employees flying with school age children. Shareholders should demand senior management unemployment applications.
Sure seems like this was an exceptional storm. Widespread, deep cold reaching into Mexico, snow falling across much of the U.S., Buffalo hit with the most snow in 20 years, records set multiple locations.
I wonder if board of directors will compare performance with other airlines.
Anyway, doesn't even the best testing only catch 40% of bugs or thereabouts? It's not a silver bullet.
Pull the backup tapes, hand those to DR team, provide bare metal, and start the stopwatch. I participated in this in 1990s across the Mississippi.
(Look forward, reason backward).
The thought was that it needs to be something that isn’t believable to a non-technical user seeing it on their computer screen. It turns out that this is not necessarily useful. I listened to a guy talking about some issues with a record; he says “1871? What’s up with that?” And then just moved on as if “well it came out of the computer, must be right” or something.
I think that databases need to have the concept of NaN for dates and time stamps, except that this should be configurable to something like a poop emoji or something like ⁉🆘. It has to be something where your grandma would look at it and confidently say “your computer is broken”
How about just NULL?
Now GLHF!
In some situations, you are trading one known point of failure for a million unknown ones. Among other problems :)
Default date types, with some columns being nullable, work just fine for my project. I wouldn't want them to be more complicated and force me to consider additional cases, especially if those cases aren't language compatible.
Off topic, but this reminded me of:
Hello, I'm Mr. Null. My Name Makes Me Invisible to Computers
As someone who writes some very thorough unit tests... and also have had to have mandatory training... I find "this isn't a drill you can run" to be _very_ wrong.
It would not surprise me that their back-office operations are likewise economized and some things are just not done because "they can never happen."
Meh, it doesn't even have to be "never". It just has to be cost multiplied by frequency is less than the cost to prepare.
If they lose $100m every five years due to a system failure, and it would cost $30m/year to plan for those failures, they it's just cheaper to let it happen.
And I don't mean this in a judgmental, Fight Club-car recall speech kind of way. It's just business reality. At some point every business has to decide that the cost of planning for something is higher than the cost of letting it happen.
Sometimes businesses end up on the wrong side of that bet. They see only the costs but not the benefits of preparedness (by the time it fails, there will probably be a different CEO in charge) and make a bad call.
The airline industry feels like one where each year it's a different carrier who has some catastrophic scheduling failure. Today, everyone says they're never flying Southwest again. But if you fly semi-regularly then it won't take very long before you don't have any airlines left to fly on.
For people who weren't affected, I doubt very many are even going to remember this. Personally, I remember that this kind of thing has happened recently with other carriers but I couldn't even tell you who.
And people who were affected can mostly be bought off if you need to. Some vouchers & hotel reimbursement and it's just the cost of doing business.
Plus, the airline industry has proven over and over that people are willing to put up with a lot when you have the cheapest prices.
It's different from an industry that's built on reputation and trust. Like, a password manager, the only real thing you're selling is your reputation. Losing trust is a real existential threat. Security costs need to be in the bucket of either "yes, we will do it" or "it's so expensive that if we do it then we don't have a business anyway, so we'll skip it and pray."
I think reputation impacts in this industry from anything other than crashes don't hold much staying power.
I'm actually quite tempted to buy the SWA dip...
Southwest isn't a particularly budget airline compared to modern budget carriers like spirit and ryanair that haven't copied the open boarding policy. I suspect the opportunity to upsell seats / luggage and have distinct classes outweighs the turnaround time costs of assigned seating.
They're also the "friendly airline", they easily have the most personable and friendly staff. I don't know what they do different, but Southwest employees treat me human and all the rest generally treat me like human trash. It's got to be a company culture thing, maybe connected to Southwest not having a first-class section.
Usually I fly with Southwest whenever possible without thinking twice about it, but this outage and the outage last year are forcing me to reconsider. Better to deal with rude people than to have my flight delayed..
Definitely. Normal American customer service is to treat you like human trash, so obviously Southwest has decided to do this differently and so probably does things like only hiring friendly people, training them to be friendly and positive even in difficult situations, and checking on them somehow to make sure they're doing this and not just faking it for the interview and training. Other airlines obviously don't, but it's not just airlines, it's everywhere in American customer-facing business these days. Rudeness is just a normal part of America culture now.
I have a backpack that has a phone holder on the shoulder strap. When you click your phone in it, the camera is visible. I've had many a situation where someone was about to go full New York on me, but noticed the camera staring at them and toned it down. I've never once been recording.
training them to be friendly and positive even in difficult situations
That's what happened with Dr. Dao in any case. Not long after that shit show, I booked a transcon on American. Turns out it was overbooked, and they were desperate to get people off the plane. The gate agents basically asked how much money it would take to get people to volunteer to take another flight. They got their volunteers, everyone went home happy because American empowered their staff to resolve problems.
United is awful. American isn't much better.
With the exception of United I'd say most airlines I've dealt with have been pleasant whether or not I'm flying up front or have status. Yes, even RyanAir. We're in something of a golden age since (with the notable exception of Southwest) American airlines have mostly put their mergers behind them and have mostly shed themselves of CEOs who view employees as adversaries. Take a look at the bad old days of the late 80s through mid 2000s. Smisek. Lorenzo. Parker. Bastards and crooks, all of them. It's difficult to stress just how toxic airline leadership was and how that trickled down for a long time.
A fortune, they only just finished an 8-year migration to Amadeus
As a IT-VP/CIO, the statement of "there's no way to test it" is not acceptable.
Thorough unit and integration tests include failure modes. Mine include things like "what happens if the OS reports that the storage was unmounted during read/write" (because that was a failure often seen in production with some flaky SAN devices) and "what happens if the server stops responding" (because networks are generally unreliable) and "what happens if invalid (random) data is given" because data corruption is a frequent occurrence for similar reasons.
> Perhaps you have a false sense of security about what you’ve really been testing?
Perhaps. On the other hand I've seen a _lot_ of other developers test only the happy path and call it a day then spend days/weeks/months debugging failures.
The unspoken part you have to hear there is "... within the economic model of the airline business".
Business continuity gets exponentially more expensive as you chase the blackest of swans: the sheer volume of plan development and maintenance, developing exercises, table-top vs. walkthrough vs. simulation, assumptions about how many different uncorrelated failures you're prepared for deal with at once etc.
I've no doubt you could run an airline to be as resilient as (say) USAF Air Mobility Command, but no-one could afford the tickets.
They only have one geo-located data-centre?
Most of the travel industry runs on old software that would horrify a lot of people here, especially those who've never worked for a large, 30+ year old company. When I used to interview a lot of people I made it a point to mention some of the more "interesting" aspects so they'd know what they were getting into.
One example: ever tried to book a flight a year in advance? On a lot (almost all?) of systems you can't, because the underlying date format is "DEC27".
Edit to address a couple comments: logistics are hard and there are plenty of reasons why airlines wouldn't want to support booking that far out. However, the reason you can book a flight 330 days from now but not 360 days from now is almost certainly due to the date format. (I believe the windows used are less than 365 days because it's helpful to be able to have dates in the recent past. I remember seeing documentation for 360, but AA and United seem to be in the 330-340 range on their websites).
Major holiday, destination wedding, event known long in advance (e.g. Grandma's 80s does not come as a surprise).
- Annual conferences or conferences that occur every-other year - Planning family reunions because you need that kind of cat-herding lead time when you have 9 uncles/aunts on just ONE side of the family - Periods where I have some spare cash I'd like to lock in a getaway with before I spend it or something unexpected like the invasion of the Ukraine drives up fuel costs and overall prices... or a global pandemic hits - would be sweet if I could have rebooked some of my trips for for 1-2 years out when the pandemic hit - Travel for future medical stuff; at one point for 2-3 years I was taking my mom to the Cleveland Clinic every 4 months for periodic checks and it would have been super nice to be able to just book that stuff way in advance and have it all taken care of
Etc
etc
etc
I'd bet quite a few people would appreciate that ability
Complexity — Fundamentally you’re looking at a logistics software, except unlike packages you’re dealing with people who aside from expected destinations have travel lengths and time-in-air calculated down to the minute. Also unlike a package, a surprise multi-day trip, unexpected multi-leg journey, one day delay is not something passengers (and crew members) will accept or be at all ok with. And if any one thing goes wrong there’s going to be cascading failures down the line— so much that it may break your company’s entire operating workflow (e.g. Southwest) entirely, and no software can overcome that kind of organizational gap.
Airlines - There’s not many commercial passenger airlines left in the US, especially that fly nationwide. Good luck trying to convince one of these giant behemoths to move to a non-battle-tested system for core operations, especially when decades-old industry software and practices around that software exist.
Entrenched - Sabre is entrenched in airlines around the world. They don’t just provide the booking services, they do the flight tracking, the ticket handling, the upgrading, the in-flight upgrades, missed connection handling, the flight scheduling algorithms, the pricing algorithms, the pilot and flight attendant time tracking, ground crew management, even the terminal software at each gate. To replace SABRE, you would physically need to rip out and then replace software around the world. And because agents don’t work from an office usually, but at the airport, you’re going to need to conduct trainings and provide support around the entire service area, which for the largest airlines is the entire world
Scale — A lot of Sabre’s revenue comes from passengers boarded. It depends on the airline, but I believe the average is that each airline pays 10cents/customer boarded with their software (though with increases in passenger volume each year, it may be less now). Because Sabre is so prevalent, and so many flights use them, they can afford such a price. A company servicing just one regional passenger airline would absolutely not be able to compete on price, at least starting out
Also— Sabre’s software itself is actually reliable! As a corporation it is slow clunky and bureaucratic, but the actual functionality it provides is stable, battle-tested, can handle any travel edge case you can think of, and fast and efficient for those who know how to use it, while also good enough at day to day operations that it doesn’t take too much time to train new agents on how to use it for routine tasks.
I think though Southwest's issues are more on their side.
Yeah building a new GDS today is an exercise in insanity, it's a huge complexity nightmare and switching probably impossible. I always wondered if AI could eventually improve things, but the existing GDSs are unlikely to care much to try. It's basically a (tri)monopoly you can never break.
1) Replacing any software for an airline carries huge risk. They are barely operating ok with the software they have and holding it together with duct tape. Even something you might regard as ancillary, like a baggage handling software system, or flight catering software system, if it goes down, has the potential to disrupt thousands of planes and hundreds of thousands of passengers for days.
It is so significant an issue (to try to change some software, and just one out of many systems that have to talk to each other) that if an airline ever considers doing this, they may actually stop operations for some number of days while they do it rather than risk having operations go wrong. There are some rare examples of airlines doing this to try to change their systems.
2) Related to the above, airline management hates to be embarrassed by something that might work but has the potential to go badly wrong. So they are very conservative when it comes to replacing systems that are working, even if it's painful / much less functional than what they might achieve by a change.
Combine these factors (and many others) and it means that sometimes starting a new airline is simpler than trying to fix an old one...
Now there's a truly total rewrite...
Let's ask the opposite question:
Why do you feel that software necessarily needs to be modernized ?
I'm not sure how well SABRE works but I do know how fast and efficient keystroking through a non-GUI interface can be and I don't know why expert mode interfaces should ever be replaced by unsophisticated mousey-mouse-mouse ones.
At least, I feel confident in that analysis, since this exact same issue happened to Southwest in 2016, before they were using Sabre. Which would point to a chronic organizational failure
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/dr-gridlock/wp/2016/07/2...
https://www.sabre.com/insights/releases/sabre-forges-10-year...
Granted, the rollout across airlines is probably glacial
Source: I used to work there
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabre_(travel_reservation_syst...
It's not even an ASCII text app, but an EBCDIC one. Or was after EBCDIC was defined as a standard, after SABRE itself launched.
If you can see how it works, it horrifies me even more as a traveller, as from outside it just doesn't work a lot of the time.
Also if you just look at the video, we all know how bad these systems are, but are not able to do anything (starting anything new in the airline industry has too much cost).
Also speaking as a software engineer myself, it's almost never just a software fix that will magically solve everybody else's problems, that always ends up being just wishful thinking
6 years old so hopefully something has improved...
When characterized as something that can't be done instead of something they don't know how to do, you know exactly where they are on the Dunning–Kruger curve.
Investment capitalism is really a garbage system when it comes to building and maintaining basic infrasctructure like transportation, electricity grids, roads and so on. China has demonstrated that convincingly over the past two decades, hasn't it?
The difference between what's true, what some people will buy, and what you can get away with saying is gross, y'all.
Netflix and airlines are so different as to make this comparison laughable. The cost of setup and consequence of problems actually being found (ie Federal Regulations) that are not addressable (it's not like SWA didn't know about some of the eventualities), easily outclasses the need for testing every combination of situations. Kong doesn't run anything that has to do with weather turning jet fuel into sludge or 12x pre-staffing in case of massive computer failures along with assessing the possible legal consequences from each locale. The hubris of pretending that physical services on a national scale, is as deterministic as a complex automated system, is unsurprising from a certain crowd, I guess.
It sounds like there is a semi-automated system which broke somehow, or more likely failed to support the load of cascading changes that resulted from weather disruptions, and they simply don't have the capacity or flexibility to deal with this other than by cancelling flights for three days until they can sort everything out manually.
Reading between the lines a bit, one possible root cause is that their semi-automated system required crew members to update their status by phone when something goes wrong (perhaps with another human in the loop), and the sheer volume of disruption overloaded their phone system and resulted in the automated system becoming completely decoupled from the actual state of reality without sufficient bandwidth in the phone channel to get it back in sync in a reasonable amount of time.
https://www.reddit.com/r/SouthwestAirlines/comments/zw6upo/h...
I thought this too, but apparently there are no federal regulations other than reimbursement for the direct costs.
"Airlines are not required to provide passengers with money or other compensation for costs that fall outside of the cancelled airline ticket and fees tied directly to the airline ticket (such as baggage fees, seat upgrades, etc.) when flights are cancelled." [1]
"Each airline has its own policies about what it will do for customers on bumped or cancelled flights. There are no federal requirements." [2]
However, there are rules around "bumping" passengers on a flight.
"An airline is required to compensate you after involuntarily bumping you from an oversold flight in certain situations. However, there are many situations where you are not entitled to compensation." [3]
[1] https://www.transportation.gov/individuals/aviation-consumer...
[2] https://www.faa.gov/faq/what-are-policies-bumped-or-cancelle...
[3] https://www.transportation.gov/individuals/aviation-consumer...
I think some slack/spare capacity or redundancy somewhere would make a LOT of problems less likely to happen. Running lean only works out when nothing goes wrong. I know I should not be shocked by the extent of human stupidity, but why the "business" types do not get this is bizarre to me.
And paying people more would help too.
* this memo[1] from the SWA VP thats circulating dated December 21st calling a staffing emergency saying all hell is about to break loose. I'm pretty sure that guy didn't know of the software crash before it happened
* Every single piece of checked in luggage is going to take 30+ days to be found? Weird none of the extensive press has mentioned people not getting their bag. Also its pretty much an airport thing and not an airline thing. Airports are in charge of deplaning your luggage and bringing it to you
* They're running 40% of flights completely manually with 0 scheduling software? That's extremely impressive
[1] https://mobile.twitter.com/ruthschmidt/status/16074609858619...
It appears there was a MASSIVE disconnect between baggage and people, bags are ending up all over the place even though the people never left.
It’s got to be less power than the phone uses to stay in contact with the towers.
Although the airline app has always been accurate it's cheap insurance if a bag isn't properly scanned or something.
It's been great. My luggage missed a connection in december, when I arrived at the destination I could instantly see that it still was at the other airport. So while the others were waiting for the bags, I could already file a complaint (at the nearly empty complaints queue). Then three hours later I could see bag movement to the tarmac and knew that my bag cought the next flight.
Also, when in a city, it's a lot of fun to say: bring me back to my bag instead of looking up the hotel address.
For anyone with an iphone & checked bags I can really recommend it.
I think this is a great idea though and I didn't even think about "bring me back to my bag" - that's awesome :)
i believe this story. the scheduling system is too fragile and can’t automatically pick up disruptions to crew movement. they’re still manually scheduling some crews, but I think their main problem is they don’t have a way of knowing which crews are where and therefore can’t schedule flights. and it’s not every single piece that’s going to take 30 days, but it seems pretty likely that some bags will be lost that long.
But hey it's cheaper if we don't change it right? /s
(and I kinda can agree with this, like 10% because they might end contracting with some bigger IT company that doesn't care about shipping something that works)
Modernizing such a system would take enormous political + real capital. The new system would undoubtedly have many growing pains as formerly resolved problems were not covered in the new system. It’s no surprise nobody would want to touch such a system.
I've worked with airline scheduling software at almost the scale of United (about half the size, for the largest customer). That was using an Oracle database, which was a bit of a pain and a big expense, but worked fine as long as there was competent admins and competent devs. Would Couchbase be disaster-proof even when run by clowns?
Not saying there aren't better and worse choices for databases in any given situation. Just saying that there are lots of them that work perfectly well in competent hands.
If they've resorted to doing all their scheduling manually with pen and paper, any data pushed to the edge (air crews, ground staff etc) will need to be transmitted in a similarly manual fashion.
The gate/ground/air crews are not making autonomous decisions about who is flying what, when and where. That is decided by some ops/crew control structure in the airline.
Unions fight to keep a lot of data from being automated instead of manual because the automated data can be used to build individual performance metrics. For example, some baggage handling unions fought against bag scanners because then you could tell how much work different union members did.
They’re trying to keep from getting optimized to death like an Amazon warehouse worker.
Unfortunately that same automated data is really useful for dealing with situations like this. Once the manually entered data is out of sync with the real world the errors compound and you have cascading failures.
That depends on the airline and airport. It’s extremely common for the airline which operates out of a large part of a terminal to do their own ramp work.
Southwest employs thousands of ramp agents to do their own ground ops and under-wing work at their bases.
Why not? Some things aren't hard to predict, it's like a Ticketmaster employee saying "our site is probably going to go down when the Taylor Swift tour goes live". If you know your systems are deficient then you can predict they'll fail in a crisis, especially if that failure has happened before (as it has for Southwest).
This is obviously intentional, and in many parts of the US totally legal. I don't know specific Colorado laws but there is no federal law against this.
Scheduling is not an issue, and there is no need to waste an ED's time on such things. Some urgent care spots specifically have a "doctors note" service.
It doesn't make the policy any better (I've worked such jobs), but I don't think there is a need to exaggerate how the process works in real life.
It looks like this is not a fun week for anyone who works at Southwest.
1. Hiring more people (more than 3 days in advance).
2. Paying people more so they don't quit.
3. Giving people paid sick time and not threatening their jobs when they take it so that they don't come to work sick and get a bunch of their colleagues sick.
4. Selling fewer tickets and running fewer flights if you don't have enough capacity to support the current workload.
An airport subcontractor came to us having issues with getting enough baggage workers. Issue was they paid minimum wage, were located 30 minutes outside the city, and there was no public transport. There was no way for the workers to get to the job! The narrative was "these worker are so untrustworthy/lazy/full of excuses." So they would pay a 50% to an agency hoping gig-contractors could save them on single-day contracts rather than just putting that money to better wages or transit perks.
Contempt really does describe the management attitudes I ran into.
It's worse than contempt, it's abuse. He is looking for ways to make recovery from illness more difficult than it needs to be, and in turn hope some will come to work when they can't get a "regular" doctor visit in time - during a holiday week.
That memo is specifically about ground operations at DEN, and specifically because of the arctic weather conditions and a high number of sick calls and ramp agents that outright quit. You can earn more flipping burgers in Denver than you can as a SWA gate agent with five years of experience. Failing to pay staff is also a management failure.
The scheduling software crashed due to the number of pilots and flight attendants that were out of position and the number of changes that were made to the schedule. I would imagine that there was an overflow in some situation -- i.e. "the number of changed schedules should never exceed 65535" that worked every year until this one. But this system was already known to be unstable, another Reddit comment said that "there are settings you don't change for fear the entire thing will crash." Which it has before in 2016. Not expecting that history will repeat itself and doing something about it is also a management failure.
> Also its pretty much an airport thing and not an airline thing
Absolutely incorrect. While the airport runs the automated conveyance system that gets the bag from where the rampers drop it to the baggage claim, the people that handle the baggage at every manual step in between are SWA employees. If there aren't enough of them, the bags don't make it on the plane on time.
Notice that the people doing this work for Southwest Airlines are all wearing Southwest uniforms.
Like most complicated failures, this was failure with multiple causes and contributing factors. The core of the problem seems to be that management was rent-seeking without making appropriate structural changes to keep up with system load.
Additionally I was told (by a crew member) Southwest refused to meet wage demands with ramp / fuel crews so they all quit. Apparently they sent them an email basically saying a recession is coming so be thankful you have a job... Meanwhile all other jobs pay more in the area. Anecdote I know, but we did have to wait 2.5 hours for fuel on my flight.
Software is core to your business. If you don't invest in it, you're going to pay the price.
This is amazing. Southwest was famous for its operational efficiency and quality. Companies eagerly learned from them. I wonder what has changed.
Saved screenshot: https://i.imgur.com/bchgmm7.jpeg
On behalf of all employees: WE ARE SORRY! I will give it to you straight- this meltdown was caused entirely by Southwest. It was triggered by the storm, but the failure to recover quickly is on Southwest 100%. If you are still hearing “weather” almost a week after the storm, it’s not true. Couple main points: 1. Please be patient with us. We desperately want to do everything we can to get you where you’re going. 2. This shitstorm is because the crew scheduling software went belly up and it almost all has to be unraveled over the phone with crew members calling scheduling. If we had better technology which eliminated the need for phone calls, this would have been fixed by now. 3. If you are able to find alternative transportation to your final destination- DO IT. Another airline, bus, train, Lyft, rental car, ANYTHING. Southwest WILL NOT be able to get you to your destination anytime in the next few days. 4. Like I said, it’s gonna take at least a week to get back to normal operations for Southwest. If anyone has questions, I will try to answer them. I work ground ops at one of SWA’s hubs. EDIT FOR FAQs——
Checked bags are currently a disaster. Plan to not see your checked luggage for at least a month. In the interest of 100% transparency, some bags will be 30+ days lost in the system.
Will my flight for X date go out? Next 3 days- plan on a cancellation. 4-7 days- likely to go as scheduled. 7+ days- should see operational recovery.
https://www.reddit.com/r/bestof/comments/zwd1fq/u4sammich_ex...
https://www.reddit.com/r/flying/comments/zw5lsl/southwest_pi...
This has to be really hard as most systems were probably built assuming something that smelled like full staffing. Pilots can only fly X hours, and flight attendants usually can't be forced to take overtime ... there have to be similar constraints on ground crew, maintenance and gate workers, too. So when you are planning for an understaffed airline, it has to be extremely difficult to optimize where the failures will occur.
Like what do they do with the bags that are sitting on the plane for cancelled flights? Store them where they are? Figure out their origin and start queuing them to be sent there? Try to get information from the passenger about where to send it?
And then with planes and crews, do they even have "potential" flights where they would be able to reliably seat a worthwhile number of passengers?
The story being circulated by Sw employees is that this is the failure. The system needs to be manually updated when flights are cancelled or changed, and in this situation with a cascading failure they have completely failed to keep that data accurate. SW employees have said they have spent 24 hours on hold trying to inform the company where they are.
I don’t think this has anything to do with algorithmic complexity.
Eventually you send them back to the passenger's home address. I've had lost luggage before that turned up on my front porch a week later, some courier service had dropped it off.
In practice, crews have their home base, their corresponding qualifications (though for WN they probably only have one or two types)
And you can bet you can start cancelling flights once you don't have enough crew. Problem is, your crew might have gone over their allowed time and them (and your plane) are in Smallville, OH and there are passengers in Chicago waiting to fly.
Well, of course they can
Not enough pilots make the general problem infeasible, so you have to make do what you have
In practice this means a) flying the schedule as best as you can b) get people/crew/planes back to hubs c) prioritize based on displaced people/cost/other variables
Even if you could do that at an airline the margins are so razor thin. I bet there's a dollar value assigned to every second a plane is not in the air.
You either pay the predictable, ongoing cost or you pay the massive, unpredictable cost like they are currently. There's no free lunch. That is, unless you're an executive looking to boost short-term profits by eliminating "redundancy" and then peacing out before the whole thing collapses from your short-sighted, greedy ineptitude.
My wife's experience shows SWA as an exception in that.
Yes, there's a dollar value attached to everything and everything is being optimized. Southwest was among the pioneers. See the story of the ten minute turn.
Though I'm not sure it would have helped in this case.
https://simpleflying.com/aer-lingus-data-center-meltdown-com...
Actually, it appears that Southwest is already saying they'll reimburse tickets for canceled flights and potentially pay out for necessary hotels and alternate arrangements: https://www.southwest.com/html/air/travel-disruption
edit: though there is an extraordinary circumstances exception below. I'm not sure if this would qualify as that given that it's a combination of an adverse weather event and a technical system collapse.
It's not important enough to consumers, which is why the EU has to regulate it. And I'd be very interested to see how much more predictable they really are for the extra cost...
I had a partner who worked on airline optimization several years ago, as I recall there were standby aircraft in some places that could be deployed to fix problems like a plane needing unexpected maintenance. Or even needing a single label required to be flightworthy. That Southwest doesn't use hubs likely makes it more difficult to recover from this kind of disruption before breaking.
https://www.kinexcappers.com/accumulation-table/ https://www.nerconconveyors.com/Nercon/Documents/White-Paper...
I hope that DOT follows through on their earlier statement that they're going to investigate this. The CEO of Southwest has ruined more Christmases than the Grinch. Failures like this should trigger incredibly severe consequences (tickets refunded at 4x cost, $20/day paid to any passenger whose luggage is lost until they get it, lost slots in airports) that make it absolutely irrational to operate in the manner Southwest is.
No need to implement the penalties you described if you’re simply trying to align incentives. Their market cap has fallen by $1b, primarily due to this incident.
The reality is they save a lot of money by keeping virtually no slack in their system and not doing things like scaling up customer service during the holidays. If they lose some money in flight cancellations, it's still rational for them to operate like this. Plus the reality is they probably won't actually lose much - most people whose flights were cancelled will still end up taking Southwest because it's too expensive (or not possible) to book last minute tickets on other airlines. That means they just push them into the very end of Dec/early Jan when they have open capacity anyway.
For me it means that most customers would happily accept such a disaster once in a lifetime in exchange for, say, 10% ticket price reduction.
Which makes sense. The airlines have decided this as well.
Now whether the government should step in to protect people from that bias is entirely another question. I would argue yes, but I can very much see the other side that would say to simply let the market sort it out.
Well, if you believe this, go buy their stock (LUV). The market disagrees.
Here's some historical stock prices
9/1/2017 $134.64 - everything's fine
9/15/2017 $87.99 - scandal breaks and hits the news
9/17/2018 $130.55 - one year post scandal
people forget
That said, while in theory I actually think LUV is a decent trade right now, broader market conditions will keep me from messing with it.
When a storm hits a city, yes, the first plane that had to wait to take off from the airport can be said to be delayed by weather. Every other plane waiting in line behind that plane, delayed, or because they weren't able to get to that city from other destinations because they run an overly tight schedule, is due to operational choices by the airline.
Some airlines have hubs in places where snow is handled ok. Some don't. Others have them in places that have frequent thunderstorms. Some airlines operate in Hawaii and never have delays.
JetBlue used to fly A321s across the country and in the winter, strong winds would force them to stop in Kansas to refuel. That's "weather" but also the airline's choices about how to operate.
I don't think you'll ever find the FAA/DOT is going to "root cause" what weather means to airlines to be able to blame them for operational / strategic choices. It would be like the police writing up your car accident report and saying that the reason you had a fender bender was because you chose to live so far away from work.
Thus, choose your airlines and roll your dice accordingly for when you want to get where you want to be.
It's difficult to punish the kind of individual cases you're describing, but from a game theory perspective that just means that in situations like today's, you bring down the hammer in incredibly punitive fashion in order to make a single systemwide failure like this so costly that it's a no-brainer to upgrade software and keep slack in the system (particularly at high-traffic, high-importance times like the holidays).
When planes and crew are delayed somewhere, it cascades down the entire line and all the aircraft and crews are now at the wrong airports.
With the hub system, they can do a "return to base" and try to go from there, but with Southwest not having a "base" they have to esentially halt the entire system and reboot it, which is what is going on here.
At least that's part of the mess.
It is not about code or algorithm quality, it is about procedural side of things -- how the organisation is "programmed" to respond to failures. I use the word "programmed" in a very broad sense -- for me setting up a paper checklist and being able to rely on people to follow it is the same as programming.
I suspect the main difference between airlines and banks is that banks can afford to throw money on the problem and just get things done regardless of how inefficiently.
Airlines are in the much worse position -- they were able to afford being inefficient and throwing money at the problem in the past but can't do it anymore. They work with old, outdated software that wasn't built with efficiency in mind but now don't have funds to change it and are forced to maintain what they have. This may also be the answer to why sometimes they just don't have capacity to react to problem and let it cascade to bring everything to a halt.
I can only speak about the forces that act on development teams and what could most likely in my mind explain the current situation.
Another important component is disaster recovery. How quickly can the system recover from missed flights? What is the game plan for dealing with crews/airplanes that are out of place. How will they return to normal operations? Often times having a play book everyone is working from can lead to faster recoveries than dealing with each individual crisis as it happens, often with either too much micromanagement from leadership or too little coordination between departments. The play book generates a conciseness before the system is stressed.
Airline pax are probably not willing to pay for spare standby aircraft and flight and cabin crews at every airport every airline operates from.
Southwest’s original low-cost carrier business innovation was to run an all-737 fleet and make business-wide efforts to optimize for fast ground-turns, in order to get more flights out of each aircraft.
This is partly because airlines are still externalizing a good portion of the cost onto their customers, who need to rebook at short-term pricing. I'd love to see legislation to address this loophole.
Southwest used to be a budget-friendly airline with decent service. Now they're priced as much or more than the other major carriers with the added friction of having to book search flights only on their site.
4. Taxes/fees set by the city and the airport
> My airline ticket pays for ... All that for $99?
Well, if you'd split the Uber with a hundred passengers or so, it would have been a lot less than $149.
Compare the Uber (personalized, on-demand) transport to a private airplane more than a bus-in-the-sky.
The costs are fairly equivalent, oddly enough.
Good luck finding pilots to be “on-call” to fly anywhere in the world (and most commonly to small US cities) on a moments notice, with a jump seat return flight as their way home (after a night in a small city hotel).
Maintaining right sized and right placed operational buffers is an entire sub-category of within airline scheduling software/consultancy.
Those buffers will never cover a major disaster of course. They should let you hit your on-time and cancellation targets at smallest possible cost, though.
Airlines have crew on "reserve" at all times near bases to handle this problem. They are being paid to sit around and not actually work unless called in. Pilots love to try to get on the reserve list for obvious reasons.
I don't know how Southwest handles reserve, since they don't have "bases" like other airlines do.
You can poke around at the website for SlickOR (https://www.slickor.com/) to get an idea of the surface level work that goes into this.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/245236750_Airline_S...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/030504...
The two classes of solutions that I considered where optimization solvers (see Gurobi Optimization for example), and meta-heuristics (see the book Metahueristics: From Design to Implementation). If I remember correctly, the people at Gurobi started at a previous company which was spun out of an airline, but I might be confused. All the algorithms in both classes of solutions are so nuanced that it can take years to begin to grasp how their strengths and weaknesses interact with your particular scheduling challenge, and how the way you formulate the problem interacts with the ability of the algorithm to solve it.
All that said, the real problem for me was a human one: If you produce a viable schedule X, the organization involved will always want to alter the rules to stretch the available resources to cover more, and simultaneously all the schedule staff will want more flexibility and nuance in expressing their preferences. You, as the author of scheduling software, are caught between them. Neither side is ever happy with the result.
I occasionally daydream about revisiting resident scheduling (I don't recommend it, the people who use your software leave every year, are not business oriented, and don't understand the complexity of the task until they've tried it on their own their first and only attempt). If I did, I would focus less on algorithms, and more on incentives to reconcile the tension between the organization, which wants to cover the most shifts with the fewest people at the cost of flexibility and preferences, and the staff, who want more flexibility and more preferences satisfied. I think that is the core problem at a business level.
Of course this all works best when you have more employee time than you need - it’ll never solve a true shortage.
Was that just where I lived (primarily in the east), or am I missing something?
United is by far the worst airline imaginable. I actively will not fly with them after being stuck on an airplane with them for 19 hours straight due to their fuckup, only to have to spend a night in New Jersey at a terrible hotel because we then missed our connecting flight (obviously). In the end, all they offered was a measly certificate that required you to use it at United (and was the equivalent of a mere fraction of the total flight cost).
I know what you mean about fees. I just booked American for my wife last week, and it's horrid now. No free bags anymore, and you have to pay to even pick your economy seats. It was way more infuriating than the last time I'd booked.
We just did the same with American. It was like double the listed price by the time we finished with bags and fees.
Almost all airlines have gotten worse due to them getting rid of a lot of nonstop flights.
My experiences with Delta were that they were a 50/50 between a nice experience or a "should have just bought a Jet Blue / Spirit ticket" experience. My experiences with United were that anything that wasn't a major route, you were likely going to fly in a tubo-prop coffin and come out with so many aches and pains any money you saved will be spent on advil and massages. They're also the only airline that's managed to lose my luggage twice.
Since Southwest only flies 737s, you'll get a roomier ride than a regional.
As others have pointed out, they don't fly hub-and-spoke.
So when they get planes stranded somewhere, it screws up the entire system and all the planes and all the crew end up at the wrong airports, and it's extremely difficult to get everything back to where it's supposed to be.
They almost have to literally shut down the airline and start it up again, which is what you are seeing now.
Save your receipts, and submit a reimbursement request. Escalate if needed.
Their brand is going to need it, so whatever that cost is will probably be worth it for them.
Was a blessing in disguise for me as I could find a similar flight on a different airline. Hope anyone else flying Southwest can find a way to their destination
Wait, what issue? Those words didn't actually say anything.
Is this implying that it was a software failure with the scheduling software?
Any info on the details? Like, I'd think this is what scheduling software is for...
https://www.reddit.com/r/flying/comments/zw5lsl/comment/j1tn...
The direct company sites (not Expedia for example) do not give you the ability to search for vehicles at multiple locations within a mileage radius. You are forced to enter a single location for pickup. This is also true for drop off.
From what I can tell, rental car companies are not setup to easily service a one way rentals, which is what most people need right now. I’ve managed to reserve a car for pickup in KC and drop off in Phoenix for tomorrow. The quote for the two days, over $1200. This isn’t really a web site issue but it gives some context.
Here’s the baffling bit. I make a reservation this morning at Enterprise in a KC suburb and get back a confirmation number, cool. Five minutes later I get a call back that they don’t have any cars available. I ask him why, because I got the confirmation number. He says the website isn’t accurate at the moment. WTF? So when a car is rented and driven off the lot the database doesn’t update? Or worse, the local dealer data is not synced to corporate in real time?
This is a cascading mess. They don’t even have availability in Joplin, MO who’s is 3 hours from KC.
Which isn't surprising because at some point, someone needs to bring that car back to it's home base.
I wonder if that is why I seem to prefer Enterprise. Not that I would touch Hertz with a 10ft pole anyway.
Which is also why they share the same offices, countertops, parking lots, and I assume cars too when you go to the rental place in an airport.
Earlier this year, I reserved a mid-size vehicle for a few days' drive for a business trip, and after they charged my card, they told me they're bringing around a compact vehicle. I probably should have let it go, the difference in price wasn't that much (and was a work expense) but old habits die hard. "That's not what I paid for - either you can refund me the difference, or you can bring me a mid-size sedan."
They said if I could wait 15 minutes, they'd bump me up from a Hyundai Accent to a larger Toyota, but it wasn't until I sat in the car that I learned that even as a new car, it was as bare-bones as they make them. No CarPlay/Android Auto, the in-car GPS was disabled, no cruise control - I'm sure it would have had manual windows if that were an option. The Hyundai would have been a better ride, I shouldn't have fussed.
But yeah, U-Haul or Ryder or whatever, it's the stone ages there. Years ago, I drove halfway across the state to pick up a sixteen foot truck I'd reserved, and when I got there - "Yeah we don't have a sixteen foot truck, I don't know why it let you reserve that." A smaller truck wasn't an option for what we were moving. I ended up having to call around and hit some local place up.
As Seinfeld said, they're good at taking the reservation, but not good at holding it.
Called Penske, because I'd always had a good business relationship with them via my job. I was told, "Oh, yeah, we don't do that shit. If you book a truck that day, it's gonna be here, guaranteed."
Sure enough, Penske had it. We packed up the truck, I got on the road, and about 45 minutes later I got a call from UHaul telling me that I could pick up an available truck, but it was three hours away.
I laughed loudly and just hung up.
* In the US, Hertz with corporate discounts and status is usually the cheapest and most convenient option. Walk to the car, pick your car from the President's Circle, drive off. Absolutely the best experience I've had with rentals.
* Without status, it's a coin toss: Avis or Hertz, with Avis generally having worse service across the board.
* In Europe, Avis was the worst. In Israel I think it's a franchise, it was all manual entries, long waiting lines. In Portugal I had to wait in line for 1.5 hours to pick up the car because I wasn't Preferred. Their Preferred booth was empty the entire time. All I had to do was validate my drivers license, and they still refused to accept me at Preferred because they print the preferred customers in the morning. Almost missed my flight.
* Europcar in Israel - cheaper but I wasted an hour in line to _return_ the car.
* In Aruba (I think), Avis doesn't tell you they run shuttles to the airport and you have to wait 30+ min for the shuttle to come around and pick you up.
* I rented 26' trucks from U-Haul twice. Both times went well, though the first truck was very bouncy and the second truck's engine light was on, but otherwise I got from A to B with no issues.
But this all pales in comparison to this car rental company in Moldova (Eastern Europe) that took $100 to book an SUV a month in advance, and then when I arrived they said "we don't have it". The only car they had was $50/day more expensive and instead of apologizing and giving me that car, despite being more expensive, they told me that my only option was to pay more to get this car. They were fixing the A/C outside while I was trying to explain to them that it was a ridiculous demand. A bunch of crooks. I walked away. Sixt was a better experience there, and cheaper than Avis, though 4rent.md is definitely the best option with great customer service.
I rented one earlier this month online. When I showed up they handed me a confirmation and told me to pick a car and drive, key was in the cup holder. They had a manned exit barricade to confirm the car you chose, but that was it. I'm not even sure they cared if I picked a car that I didn't reserve, the exit gate person scanned the car and reservation, so it probably would have just updated the reservation on the spot. I don't think it's even possible to predict with certainty what your inventory is going to be 2-3 days out with this sytem.
Just 2 people on the rental side, although I'm sure they have a cleaning/ turnover crew.
Some of my ex-wife's colleagues returned from a conference in Denver back to the east coast in a u-haul van after all air travel was shut down on 9/11
More generally they schedule based on their return schedules. If they have a car scheduled to return at noon and you set your pickup time to one, they assume they'll have that car and be able to rent it to you. If I don't drop it off at noon they can't assume I'll drop it off at 12:01 so they need to let you know it won't be available (since they can't predict my actions).
This is all compounded by agents on the lot renting out cars under the radar or booking agents doing some customer service override. They are incentivized to rent cars, not rent to specific people. For them it doesn't matter if your car is unavailable, it got rented out which made them money.
Good luck getting a car and making your drive.
I've had great luck booking an enterprise rental car from an airport (this is key), and on the booking saying returning to the same airport.
After receiving the car, calling corporate and requesting a different city drop off. The only requirement being that it was dropped off at another airport.
Paid $75 a day for an SUV, from SF and dropped off in Bishop, CA. Reno was the same cost, as well but Bishop made sense. Did this a week ago. Worst case there's an additional cost but is it going to be $1,000 more... no way.
The reservation system probably overbooks to some extent because a certain percentage of reserved cars are never picked up.
Many rental outlets are franchise operations. It may say Enterprise or Budget on the sign but it's Joe's Car Rental LLC running the place. They may be slow at updating rentals and returns in the system. It's not all one homogenous company.
https://www.enterprise.com/en/global-franchise-opportunities...
> Please note that we do not franchise our brands in Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Spain, France or Germany.
Same thing happened to me. My wife even called the night before and talked to someone (not at the airport, though) and confirmed. The guy at the pickup had to tell 6 people at 6am that they were only honoring reservations made at least three days prior, and all of them had confirmed numbers.
Likewise, no cars are available within a two hour drive. It looks like the first few days of problems sucked up any available inventory in the system.
On rental cars, I know it’s a meme, but my god it continually surprises me how it seems the agents have to rewrite the mainframe just to hand me keys for a pre-arranged reservation.
irrops and cancellations during holidays has unfortunately been normal especially since COVID but I'm guessing fewer employees and the winter storm would cause this to happen.
Massive Southwest Airlines disruption leaves customers stranded - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34145286 - Dec 2022 (102 comments)
We don't often see freezing rain here. It creates a hard, bubbly layer of ice that cannot be scraped off with the usual tool.
Every rental car in Nebraska is unavailable for the next few days which is crazy.
There aren’t enough pilots in the pipeline and your neighborhood is doing everything it can to shut down your local GA airport where people actually learn to fly.
Would 100% support an executive getting a long prison sentence on this as well. I know it will never happen but serious consequences are the only way stuff like this stops happening.
It's a satisfying job for the right personality type!
I fly very rarely. One of the reasons is that I cannot afford to fly on carriers who charge the correct fare for sufficient quality that actually reliably gets you to your destination.
For destinations on the local rail network, I can afford it.
The storms left planes and crew scattered around at all the wrong airports, so they essentially have to reboot the system.
Other airlines are not affected by this as much as they fly out of hubs.
And they did it over Christmas and during big storms to maximize the impact to the company.
Not unless this new CTO's roadmap includes development of a time machine. Engineering design alone will not prevent this kind of outcome.
Why couldn’t all of these things be handled easily through the app?
Maybe it won’t prevent my flight from being cancelled, but when they do cancel my flight I’m not left scrambling to figure a plan B so I don’t miss meeting my family for the holidays.
Logistics problems, especially the logistics of moving humans, are both complicated and complex. You are talking about systems which must interact with manual, human-in-the-loop processes every step of the way. The feedback loops between the digital systems and physical systems are often loose and very costly to tighten (regulations, union rules, passenger behaviors) and the underlying systems that all participants must interact with were some of the very first widespread digital systems.
Today's problem was probably preventable, but don't underestimate how hard the problems become as soon as a system begins to depend on humans and the real world.
And that’s why we’re in this position to begin with… until someone comes along to disrupt it.
For actual mission critical systems, like delivering packages, UPS Airlines uses a cool concept called a hot spares where an extra airplane is somewhere in the sky, ready to take on slack if there were issues on another plane
/ this was a lonng time ago, like 10+ years, it could be a very very different animal now