More flights canceled as Southwest tries to end its operational collapse

The American airline Southwest Airlines, caught in a tangle of technical problems and lack of preparation to face last week’s winter storm, still has not managed to put an end to its crisis.

This Thursday, while other companies have already been recovering normality, Southwest canceled another 2,300 of its flights. Company leaders continue to apologize to their customers and promise service improvement. So said Ryan Green, Head of Commerce for Southwest Airlines: “My personal apology is the first step in making things right after so many plans changed and our experience fell short of meeting your expectations of us.”

The operational and public relations crisis not only left thousands of travelers stranded. It also unnerved employees and put company officials on the defensive, hoping to prevent long-term damage to Southwest’s reputation.

Now, under federal investigation, the airline invited its passengers to keep receipts for the extra expenses they had to incur, in order to guarantee their reimbursement.

Southwest passenger Joyce Gresham recounts her experience: “They kept telling us ‘we don’t have a crew, we don’t have a crew, we can’t take off without a crew.’ We stayed there, no one really briefed us on anything. And then after an hour or two, they’d say something like, ‘we don’t have any updates, we don’t know.’

As of Thursday morning, the airline had canceled only a few of its flights for Friday, unlike in previous days when thousands of flights were canceled a day earlier. So much so that Southwest said that the situation will return to normal already this Friday.

Southwest’s collapse began with the storm, but this was just the beginning of an ever-growing chain of technical problems that experts say are due to using a very old operating system and a different organizational structure than other airlines. , which prevented him from recovering quickly. The company promised a restructuring to prevent such a collapse from happening again.