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This is possibly better saved for a small questions Sunday, but can someone explain why is the federal government up-in-arms over Southwest's latest boondoggle to me?
I understand why Southwest is getting hammered by popular opinion and in the press. I wasn't personally affected but I know a few people who were (8 hour delays, last-minute cancellations, etc) and I understand their frustration. I absolutely understand customers demanding refunds on cancelled flights or compensation for excessive delays. This, to me, is the market reacting and correcting itself. Southwest failed to deliver what it promise and it is reaping the economic and PR whirlwind.
What I don't understand are promises from both the Secretary of Transportation and POTUS to "hold the airlines accountable", which just seems weird to me. Is there a regulatory or national security reason for the Feds, much less POTUS, to be weighing in on this? Is it a straight-forward consumer protection issue or is it just the straight populist look-we-are-doing-something-to-people-you-currently-hate kind of politics that I am currently reading it as? What am I not seeing/understanding here?
I have limited insight into this: I had a former student who worked at Charles de Gaulle airport as maintenance crew, and he would explain to me the changing labour situation with respect to the airport. According to him the goal was to pare down staff to minimum required levels: anything to reduce costs was acceptable because they were in a highly liberalized market where consumers are very price-sensitive (for reasons unknown, customers discriminate by price much more heavily in air travel). That meant limiting crews, getting rid of redundancies, using third party, non-union contractors for every bit of unskilled labour, and generally running as light as possible personnel-wise. This meant that when you had those three or four days a year with bad snowstorms you got absolutely fucked and you have no one in reserve to handle the massive increase in work; but hey, that's a few days in the year and the other 360 customers get cheaper fares. People who get shafted are angry of course, but ultimately they don't interface with upper management and they forget soon anyways because hey, air travel is ridiculously cheap for what you're actually getting: unsurpassed convenience and safety for intercontinental travel.
My dad just got delayed 6 hours in Vancouver flying back (he was lucky: lots of people delayed multiple days). He couldn't fathom why every problem seemed to be someone else's responsibility (I tried to explain that job roles are heavily specialized to minimize the number of skilled labourers), why airport workers were so laid-back (it's no one's dream to load luggage, and they're not getting paid particularly well), and why in general the airport seemed entirely unused to this strange white substance falling from the sky (they know snow exists, it's just cheaper to not prepare for it).
What else is there? OK, there's of course loyalty programs, but you have to fly quite a lot for them to be of any serious benefit - to the tune that you have to either be rich or fly not on your own dime (e.g. work travel) to get benefits that are worth serious consideration. The basic service - i.e. the economy class - is pretty much the same everywhere. You get the same 2 inches to the next seat and same water-and-salted-mini-pretzels. You can't pay extra to not have your flight cancelled or to have less turbulence or anything else both affordable for a middle-class person and important. So, what else beyond price is there? For me that would be:
Convenience. I'd pay extra for non-stop vs stop flight - but lines probably can't easily change that.
Convenience 2 - I'd pay some extra for convenient time (not departing at 7 am or arriving at midnight) but less than for extra stop. Also probably hard for a company to make it optimal everywhere.
Overall cost - i.e. if I can save on bags charges, or fly to an airport for which the next leg of the journey would be cheaper, or have some other benefit like that, I may agree to get a pricier ticket if the difference is less than the benefit
That's about it. If I am not paying for it - e.g. work travel - I'd of course optimize for my own convenience and for whose miles would work better for me, but that's another story.
BTW, I usually do not downgrade my opinion about the airline because of one-off delays. Shit happens. If the company manages it reasonably (as a minimum - get me a hotel and a couple of meal vouchers if you delay me substantially, and have the staff handle it without panicking themselves and making me panic) - I'll write it off as such and move on. If it keeps happening then I'll likely start paying extra to avoid such an airline - but so far I don't think Southwest is worse than anybody else in this regard.
There certainly is some evidence that Southwest is an outlier: "More than 90% of Wednesday’s US flight cancellations were Southwest flights, according to flight tracking website FlightAware.". And "As of Wednesday, Southwest Airlines had canceled 58% of its flights scheduled for Thursday" whereas "By contrast, as of Wednesday afternoon, United Airlines had canceled just 11 flights scheduled for the day; while American Airlines had canceled 23, FlightAware said. Each figure accounted for less than 1% of the respective company's total flights.".
Yeah I get that there's a particular set of circumstances which broke SW model in ways that it wouldn't break models for other companies. The question is, how often this particular set of circumstances is likely to re-occur? If it's once-per-20-years, I won't likely pay much premium to not fly SW. If it's "every other year" then I'd be more cautious. If it's "likely to happen every time there's a storm", then I'd only fly SW if it gives deep discount and I am not particularly upset if the flight gets cancelled. But the latter does not seem to be the case - there were many storms before, and SW did not break in this fashion.
I am certainly not encouraging you to stop flying Southwest. But it is certainly a problem: It is very difficult to know how much more likely SW is to have a delay than other carriers, and hence it is very difficult to know how much of a discount you should demand. It might well be effectively zero.
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Yeah this isn't really weather related, Southwest's solver/optimizer broke with the added constraints and they have to solve a gigantic travelling salesman problem with a lot more manual work now.
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