DENVER — Holiday travelers flying Southwest right now are asking, who is going to help cover the costs of being stuck? People are buying more expensive tickets to get to their destinations, hotel rooms, food and rental cars during mass flight cancellations.
Skyler McKinley with AAA Colorado gave us some answers.
What are passenger rights?
"You are entitled to a refund under federal law, even if you have a non-refundable ticket," McKinley said. "You can use that refund to buy a ticket for a competing airline. It will cost you."
He said regardless of the reason for a cancellation, if an airline cancels a flight previously advertised on its website or a flight available for booking, a passenger is entitled to refund. However, the money may not be returned before a person has to rebook another flight.
It also doesn't cover additional costs like hotel rooms, renting cars and alternative transportation and meals.
Southwest has said it would look into reimbursing some additional costs, so McKinley suggested saving your receipts.
"We know that 40% of Americans would have significant difficulties with emergency expenses of more than $400. They don't have that in savings," McKinley said.
He added that rebooking last-minute tickets can be as much as five times as expensive as the original ticket a person bought.
"For many working families, this is going to have devastating economic impacts they will feel well into the New Year," he said.
McKinley also said the situation with Southwest reveals major blind spots in federal protections for airline passengers.
"Not a lot of protections out there," he said. "The rule only says airlines must refund money if there is a cancellation or a significant delay. But they [the airlines] get to define what a significant delay is. I think [it's] very likely U.S. Department of Transportation, federal law makers, even some states' attorneys general are looking at how to protect folks, so this doesn't happen again."
"In this case, I think Southwest is going to have to admit these are significant delays," McKinley said. "The only real protection air travelers have is getting that refund. There is no strict timeline on when the airlines have to get that money back to you."
Both McKinley and Southwest are encouraging people to use their online form to request a refund.
Is anyone doing anything about this?
Southwest's CEO Bob Jordan said this week that he reached out to U.S. Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg to continue discussions the airline is having with the DOT about how to make things right.
That includes teams working on processing refunds and reaching out to customers who are dealing with costly detours and reroutes.
The airline said it's clear they need to double down on making improvements to their system and will continue to operate a reduced schedule by flying roughly a third of their scheduled flights for the next several days.
"We are optimistic to be back on track before next week," Jordan said.
"[We're] likely a week out from a return to normalcy for Southwest, which is bad timing. A lot of folks traveling for the New Year," McKinley said. "If you have a flight booked on Southwest between now and then, I think the unfortunate reality is to expect a cancellation. There is a significant problem with their technological back end that can only be fixed by getting crews back into place. The only way to do that is pulling back their flights as they move people around the country."
What about my bags?
"It gets a little ridiculous with what's going on," McKinley said. "Generally, luggage is lost in the shuffle when folks have a transfer at the airport. Increasingly, as folks are rebooking flights, some direct flights have been converted to transfer flights, so luggage is arriving at airports where folks didn't arrive at all, because they then got rebooked a second time before their baggage caught up."
McKinley's advice is, if you are flying Southwest, try to fly with only a carry-on. If that's not possible, make sure you have extra changes of clothes with you and pack any medications you need in your carry-on.
"There's no easy answer. Be in touch with Southwest if you have a lost bag," he said.
He also asked travelers to be kind to the front-facing Southwest employees.
"It can be easy to take it out on a desk agent, or customer service agent on the phone, or flight attendant. They are walloped by this too. This isn't a staff level failure - it's a system level failure," McKinley said.
He also gave some historical perspective:
"These sorts of things do happen, generally once a year. Especially post-pandemic as airlines were staffing back up. Remember, many pilots took an early retirement. Many workers were furloughed and didn't return to work because the airline industry completely shut down as a function of travel shutting down because of the pandemic," he said. "It's taken a lot longer to staff the airlines back, which is why 2021 and 2022 have been frustrating travel years."
"What's so surprising about what's going on right now is there were assurances from Southwest and other airlines that they had the capacity to manage this. They knew this was going to be a busy travel season. They were staffing up ahead of it. They had systems in place. That storm threw everybody for a loop," he added.
McKinley said the difference is how other airlines bounced back versus Southwest taking the lion's share of cancellations.
What about employee conditions?
Southwest confirmed an internal memo was sent to Denver ramp agents on Dec. 21, declaring a state of operational emergency because so many people calling out.
That means folks who called out sick needed a doctor's note on the first day they came back. The company would deny requests for reported personal absence, and failure to comply with working regular shifts would be considered insubordination and result in termination. It also said mandatory overtime would be utilized. That memo was in effect for a few days through Christmas Eve.
The union representing ground workers at Southwest Airlines put out a statement saying ground workers needed more support.
The statement read in part:
"Many of our people have been forced to work 16-hour or 18-hour days during this holiday season. Our members work hard, they're dedicated to their jobs, but many are getting sick, and some have experienced frostbite over the past week. In severe weather it's unreasonable for workers to stay outside for extended periods. People need to be able to cycle in and out of the cold. The airline needs to do more to protect its ground crews. Although it can be complicated, especially during the holiday season, we need to consider better spacing of flights during extreme weather events in the bitter cold of winter – as well as the extreme heat of summer. When the forecast for Denver, Kansas City, Atlanta, Nashville,
Baltimore, Chicago, Portland and a long list of other key markets for the airline looks challenging, as it did over the past week, we should consider slowing the entire schedule."
In response Southwest wrote:
"We are not offering comment on this topic directly; however, Southwest has a 50+ year history of listening to and taking care of our valued Employees."
What if I re-booked with another airline?
McKinley wrote:
"It looks like a high likelihood that the other airlines will get you to where you need to go, although periodic cancellations will still happen as a function of weather. The broader issue, I think, is availability: There's just not that many available seats on competitor airlines, since so many folks are traveling right now as it is - combined with surging demand among those rebooking off Southwest. In rare cases, flights may be overbooked - but I suspect the other airlines are going to try to do everything they can right now to avoid unhappy customers and additional regulatory scrutiny, given what SWA is dealing with."
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