This transcript was prepared by a transcription service. This version may not be in its final form and may be updated.Alison Sider: Oh, no. No. I don't go anywhere over the holidays. That's a nightmare. I don't know why you would do that.
Alison Sider: People were expecting really, really cold freezing sub-zero temperatures in a lot of the country. Alison Sider: Yeah, it was bad. I mean, airlines were saying some of them had planes that were left outside that were coated in ice. They had jet bridges freezing, they had fuel pumps congealing, power outages at the airports.Speaker 6: Southwest Airlines experiencing a system wide meltdown.Speaker 8: Major meltdown at Southwest Airlines.
Ryan Knutson: The day Southwest canceled about 70% of its flights, other airlines saw cancellation rates of 10%, or even lower. Southwest has said there are a few reasons why it fared so badly. One is that the storm hit critical cities like Denver and Chicago where the airline has a lot of crew members. But the company has also singled out another factor, its own inadequate technology. One piece of technology that's come under particular scrutiny is called Sky Solver.
Ryan Knutson: With Sky Solver struggling, Southwest had to do its scheduling manually, and it was such a massive task, it recruited employees from around the company to help figure it out. Ryan Knutson: In theory, this can be more efficient because there's less downtime. For example, a southwest plane might start the day in Virginia before flying to Baltimore, Tampa, Puerto Rico, Orlando, Dallas, and then ending the day in Little Rock. And yes, that is a real route, but during storms, this point to point system can create issues.
Ryan Knutson: James and his family were rescheduled for a flight four days later, and he says Southwest promised that his checked bags, which were now trapped at the airport, would make it on his next flight. But as James and his family sat on the plane getting ready to finally fly to Sacramento, he knew their bags weren't on board. And how did you actually find out for sure that your bags weren't on it?Ryan Knutson: James had put Apple location tracking air tags inside their bags.
Ryan Knutson: What did that allow them to do, just figure out where everybody was and give them time to figure out, "Okay, Bob, flight attendant, needs to be at this airport and then get them to that location," or just sort of-
Source: Holiday News (holidaynews.net)
alyrose equity economy
alyrose Excellent episode. But I would push back on the notion that people will chose to fly another airline because of their poor experience this Christmas. Price has consistently been the deciding factor for which airline consumers choose to fly. We saw it for the MAX and during Covid.
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