Cat Neville from Explore St. Louis joined KMOX to share her weekly recommendations of how to spend your weekend in St. Louis — but first, she shared her experience at Lambert Airport over the holidays.
In the last few days, passengers hoping to get on a Southwest Airlines flight for a winter vacation or holiday gathering were met with long lines, delays, cancellations, and general havoc and disorganization. Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg called for accountability from the airline, saying the issues had gone beyond weather delays.
Neville was flying direct from Orlando back home to St. Louis after visiting her dad for the holidays, and found a “bizarrely long line” at the rebooking and cancellation area.
“All of a sudden, we start seeing these alerts to our phones that just say ‘Your flight’s delayed, your flight’s late,’” Neville said. “We still didn't really understand what was happening. But all the queues at each one of the gates started getting longer and longer and longer.”
Neville’s 12 o’clock flight got delayed until 4:30, and at 4:30 on the dot, a flight attendant announced that the flight was canceled.
“I understand it's kind of like the system-wide rolling meltdown. But my issue was that there was no advice on what to do next,” she said. “If you want to rebook, if you want to cancel, here's what to do with your luggage. Everything was just, ‘It's canceled.’”
Neville eventually got home — separately from her luggage — on a Spirit airlines flight. When she arrived at Lambert, there were hundreds of people trying to talk to the baggage claim office.
Her experience wasn’t unique. Southwest has canceled more than 13,000 flights in the past week, including more than 2,500 on Tuesday alone. Jerome Katz, a professor at SLU’s business school, described it as a “meltdown.”
“And it's the third meltdown in two years, because they've had major outages in June of ‘21, October of ‘21. And now the one that we're seeing at this moment, 90% of all the cancellations in the world are at Southwest Airlines.”
Katz said the airline’s stock price is continuing to drop, and likely won’t be stabilized until the federal government announces their plans for investigating Southwest.
So why is Southwest in particular struggling right now? Katz said part of the problem is technology-based.
“Southwest is famous for trying to take the simplest approach to handling things,” he said. “But the Achilles heel is, their computer and communication systems are really old school. And they really can't work as well as the competition's, they're more prone to problems. And when problems hit, they start to multiply because of the way Southwest positions their planes and people.”
Hear more about the Southwest Airlines debacle from Cat Neville and Jerome Katz on KMOX:
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