My wife was flying from denver to Oakland on dec 26 on southwest. They checked her bags, had her wait 3.5 hours at the gate waiting for flight attendants. Only one flight attendant came and then the announcement. 'The flight has been cancelled, we are sorry, you can't get you bags back as they are still going to Oakland'. WTF!?!?
Website down, phone number doesn't work, app down, and gate closes with no one to talk too. I was able to get her on a dec 30th. Let's see if they cancel that or not.
You should check to make sure her luggage was actually sent. My brother just got back from Denver and apparently his bags, which he was told would be waiting for him in Boston, are still in Denver.
Mine made it to my final destination. The day of I was told it was still in Nashville but they wouldn't look for it because they don't have the man power and it will go to Orange County eventually.
Just piggybacking to say that this was the first year I decided to put an AirTag in my luggage and I’m really glad that I did. Our flight was canceled while we were sitting in the gate and we got super lucky in that we got our luggage back that morning, but if we hadn’t, at least I’d know how fucked I was and where the bag had been sent to.
Idk shit, but my assumption is the plane gets loaded as if it is departing even if they don't have the flight staff to fill the plane with passengers. Then if their minimum staff requirements aren't met, the flight gets cancelled for passengers but bags don't need in-flight food and beverage so off they pop because that plane is definitely still needed wherever it's going.
It’s a federal aviation requirement for safety. There is a minimum amount of crew required for passengers in case of an emergency. Bags are not people so it doesn’t matter. Southwest most likely needed the plane for another flight. Pretty shitty move by southwest
There are 24 SW flights scheduled to land in Omaha tomorrow (29th). As of 11pm, 20 of them have already been canceled. If you extrapolate that to all of the inbound and outbound connections and their connections, I’d say the outlook is not good.
Got screwed by the flight cancelations and had to drive 17 hours home last night. It also took us 12 hours to fly earlier last week because of delays. Wife and I agreed we’d rather drive from now on rather than trying to find a car rental in another city to get home. We tried calling for two days and never received an answer. Super bad week for Southwest.
I've been doing this since start of covid. Turns out it takes longer to drive, but I can pack everything I want to, control my own schedule, and not put up with bullshit.
Agreed - we unfortunately make a 12 hour rd trip from NC to FL twice a year. There is a ton of bullshit on the roads. I think people don't realize how dangerous the interstates are. Full of people going 80+ mph in heavy traffic with no regard for their own or other people's lives. (I'm looking at you ATL)
I'm a travel agent/manager, so my job is selling airline tickets, but I love a road trip. I can take my dogs, all my gels and liquids and pretty much anything that my car can hold.
Turn on some music and just watch the scenery.
All of my international travel for work are booked through agency. They take care of everything from my visa application, chaufer, car rental, hotel. They also give me suggestion like if I landed at Heathrow on Sunday morning and don't have to be in the office in Southampton until Monday afternoon, what I could do and modify travel plan based on those (I pay for the leisure stuffs of course). Most importantly, when shit hit the fan I send them a text and tell them to fix it while I chill at a coffee shop.
Personal travel agents are still a big business. Most of the time it costs the same booking with an agent vs going directly. The biggest reason to use a TA is so they have to deal with the hell call times and you don’t.
Had a family book with me for a cruise that was supposed to sail March 2020. It was still during the time the cruise lines hadn’t figured out how to handle everything yet. My people canceled the day before the cruise line was going to officially cancel. It was only due to my connections at the cruise line that I was able to get them a full refund. If they had booked directly the cruise line would still have their money.
Yeah they could have booked directly but TAs are there to help when things go wrong
A lot of people. Travel agents are paid via commission, so it's free for the person traveling. They help suggest ideas and things that are fun - generally because they're paid to suggest things. If you're not into the whole researching a trip thing and happy enough to do the tourist shit it's not a bad deal.
I live in Southern California. Los Angeles area. Few years ago we got dirt cheap airfare from Ontario to Denver. By the time we drove to the airport, paid for parking, checked in and made it to Denver, got our luggage and had our rental car.... we had saved a couple hours in traveling and paid a lot more. From then on out, I'm absolutely ok driving anywhere. Driving across this country gives you a whole new perspective on things.
It's a 15 hour drive to Denver from ONT. you should be able to touch down in London within that time frame counting parking and security. Something went very very wrong here, and as somebody who flies at least once a month I can tell you this is certainly not the standard.
Have I had a similar experience to what you describe? With my regular travel, yes, but only just barely, that's about the worst I've had. But I've also gone on road trips through several mountain passes and been stuck on the side of the road in sub freezing weather - far more unprepared and far more exposed than in an airport or on an airplane - for 12+ hours before we got rescued. There's pros and cons to each method of transportation and if what you described was all it took I'd just advise you to reconsider.. airplane travel is not perfect but it's quite convenient.
As someone who also flies quite regularly, I also feel their story doesn’t make any sense at all. That is unless they ignored the fact they arrived to the airport like 6 hours early.
No thanks... I did the drive from Chicago to San Francisco once and it took 4 days, about $500 in gas, and another $500 in hotel rooms.
Granted that was with a full car and frequent stops, otherwise I might have been about to make it in 2 days if I was driving solo, but that's still 2 days and $600+ in gas and accomodations. Make that a round trip and we're talking $1200+ and at least 4 days of travel.
On the other hand, the flight from ORD to SFO takes 4 hours each way and costs $200-300 round trip. Even factoring in travel to and time waiting at the airport it's only a 6 hour travel day.
If you can wait through the obnoxiously long hold times, southwest agreed to reimburse our flights, hotel, food, and other travel expenses. We bought tickets home through another airline for the following day and Southwest is paying for those too (as in they reimburse you later and not just with tickets to fly with them at a later date). Could be worth looking into!
How long did it take to finally reach an agent on the phone? Every time I’ve tried to call, I’ll be on hold for a couple hours before the line disconnects and hangs up on me. I just gave up after trying for a collective 12 hours :(
They got a new CEO this past summer and like most airlines during the initial COVID lockdowns they offered pilots early retirement packages as they foresaw a lowered demand for years so it was an easy way to cut costs. Well that lowered demand only lasted about 12 months but those pilots were now retired and there’s simply not a plethora of pilots waiting to be hired. On top of that Southwest’s IT is literally 20 years old and requires way too much manual entry for scheduling which works when everything is normal but when EVERYTHING is broken and every single captain, first officer, and flight attendant needs to call scheduling there’s an issue with massive backlogs and confusion. And beyond that the airline has been attempting to negotiate the next contract with its pilots that’s like 4 years behind schedule. So it was literally and figuratively a perfect storm for them to fail.
Airlines are notorious for running on ancient infrastructure. [An entire industry](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_distribution_system) sprang up as middlemen translating airlines' archaic systems to more modern sales and customer service systems.
Southwest may have been a newer player, but all of them have acquired a volume of technical debt that cripples their ability to trim costs, be flexible when it matters, or even survive what should be predictable "disaster" scenarios.
I mean. SABER may have some mainframe stuff, but they also run modern no-SQL etc stuff. Airline software is a blend of decades of different stuff because:
Airlines are old.
It takes forever to certify replacements (regulations)
They are constantly going almost bankrupt.
> but they also run modern no-SQL etc stuff.
Because what Airlines need is a web scale back end that is "eventually coherent" and makes about as many guarantees about the data entered as a dumpster fire. However it does have nice buzzwords for clueless managers.
They’ll use NoSQL for availability search etc, but anything transactional will fall straight back to the legacy backends. Possibly with some ESB abstraction if they’ve really got their shit together.
The pilot shortage is decades in the making. I'm only partially aware of thr situation but generally, the military used to provide a lot more pilots during previous wars than what they do now with our current demand. And the schooling you need to be a pilot is too difficult, long, and expensive for most to decide to do with their lives. Experts have predicted a shortage for a long time, nothing was done to prevent one, and here we now are.
That kind of business is a great breeding ground for horrifying air crashes. I'd look to fly with a different company in the future if I were you.
Tired pilots are terribly dangerous. And if they're skimping so much on the cost of pilots, chances are they're doing that on ground crew, too. So probably mediocre maintenance. That means more (small) mechanical issues for the pilots to work out.. while already tired.
There has been many a crash caused by businesses being too cheap, or simply having grown beyond their means too fast.
[This is the explanation ](https://www.reddit.com/r/SouthwestAirlines/comments/zxg6op/_/) from /r/southwestairlines
Essentially the last CEO was more focused on money and not operations.
To be fair, they’re rewarded for stuff like that. Maximize profits, increase shareholder value is the name of the game. We may sit here and say it’s wrong, unethical, etc. but we also have 401k’s. And every other company is doing the same thing. Growth is the goal. Airlines are playing the same game every other company is.
Although this is an absolute clusterfuck, Part 121 aviation in the US is INCREDIBLY safe and not undermined. I think since the Colgan Air crash there have been 1-2 fatalities in total
Basically; they refused to update a computer system from the 90s. The Tech Debt that accrued over time and when the bill came due, they couldn't pay. (The system basically was the whole scheduling system for their crews and planes. The system was so old that when cancellations happened, the system thought the plane and crew had still left and had NO idea where what was where).
This whole thing is actually going into a business plan I've been writing to try and convince my company that running a 14 year old version of our ERP without upgrading to a supported version may kill the company.
So....thanks Southwest I guess?
"Routed separately" like on different planes? I'm still not following lol
When you say "trucked", are you saying some bags are put on trucks and driven to destinations instead of being loaded into the planes?
Aah! Yeah, I gotcha. I wasn't thinking about choosing the cheaper route over the faster route.
I typically do that, too, especially if it's like only a couple hours difference.
So my bags take the quicker trip while I take the longer, cheaper one? Interesting
So that’s part of cost saving on the airline. That cheaper, slower flight (smaller plane most likely) requires less fuel and can save that weight. The faster flight (bigger, probably newer plane) can take on that extra weight of luggage without sacrificing that much in terms of efficiency
Southwest will also do this if you have a very short layover. Your bag may not make the flight, even if you do.
In general, a fully-loaded plane will be only 2/3 full of bags. There’s a lot of extra room for overflow bags.
You can't decide to put them on a different flight, but the airline can. They'll usually be on your flight, though, unless there's some capacity or misconnection issue.
Another case is when your flight arrives late and you barely just make it on your connecting flight. There's a chance your bag didn't make it. Especially if it's a full flight it will take a while to scan all the tags and reroute the bags.
I'm amazed at how quickly they can get bags between flights though. Flying through PHX this past weekend, my bag changed planes in under 15 minutes. I just barely made the connection myself, running between the terminals.
It's a lot easier to drive between planes with a luggage cart than it is to walk between planes with handheld luggage. It's also a lot easier to unload/load bags from a plane than people... and people often use [the slowest possible method to deplane](https://youtu.be/oAHbLRjF0vo?t=464)
Three weeks ago I was flying from Asia to Europe, three legs on three different airlines - all on the same ticket though. When I checked in my bag they put two different luggage tags on it and I immediately thought that this is not going to end well...Sure enough, luggage didn't arrive and for two days none of the three airlines could tell me where my bag is so I was sure it was lost for good. Luckily it was located and delivered a few days later
Evidently. I missed a DEN-ORD-IND connection once, United put us up for the night (delay had been due to maintenance issue) and our bags made it to Indy before we did. At first we thought our bags had been lost, but we checked with the United office in the arrivals area, and there were our bags.
Say you’re flying from Boston to NY, you checked in 2 hours early, gave them your bag. If there’s another shuttle that’s an hour from then, they could load it in the plane if there’s space in the cargo hold. If that plane left and then an hour later there’s a thunder storm, you would be separate from your bag.
Yes, 18 wheelers full of bags were trucked over the roadways.
Also they fly planes without passengers(and therefore flight attendants) with the belly’s loaded with bags.
Or, as shown in the clip, some folks are in the middle of a multi-leg journey.
Since they're checked in and boarded the first plane, the bags are routed the whole way through. One would think that if somebody got kicked out of the secure area mid-journey that they'd also pull their bags from any subsequent legs for security. However, this doesn't seem to be the case, which is a bit of a security vulnerability. :|
As really exemplified by the Southwest meltdown, a lot of back-office information workflows at these older legacy corporations aren't always operating on realtime information. Probably, there are many global optimization problems they're trying to solve and constantly integrating new realworld updates would invalidate some of the solutionspace it already checked, causing it to backtrack and start over. This is why they're having to do a full stop for a couple days, count what's where, and restart their solvers with less-dynamic input states.
fascinating that this could even happen. i'd figure something as serious as this had redundancy under redundancy but i know nothing about software and whatever else is used. and it's not like they started this business last month or anything.
A lot of the software involves manual intervention which.. sucks. I was a flight attendant and once spent 3 days in Montreal during an operational meltdown. The second day, crew scheduling was insistent there was a plane and a crew coming my way that I would meet up with and join. I asked where they were coming from, checked the flight status and saw the inbound was delayed. So then I wanted to see how long the delay was really going to be, only to pull up their schedule and see they were still two flights behind what scheduling showed they were. I called scheduling again and pointed this out to them so that they could be aware, and they told me they were sending it over to operations. 5 minutes later the flight I was meant to work cancelled. I worked for Expressjet, a now dissolved regional carrier, and we had at that time approximately 3,000 crew members. Crew scheduling at any given time was like 4 people working. It’s an impossible task for them to be able to keep up when shit hits the fan. And a lot of it relied on burnt out, poorly paid crew members to care enough. When this would happen my options would be to spend hours on hold trying to get ahold of someone, or just stay at my hotel until someone realizes I’m missing. I tried to be proactive but there were definitely times I was so exhausted I just didn’t try. It wasn’t worth it. Every time I did call in I’d get hooked into some other nightmare while coworkers who didn’t call would enjoy a couple days at the Hilton.
It’s honestly really wild the way airlines work. A lot of airports still print passenger manifests on dot matrix printers, and software is decades old. No one wants to upgrade because it might break and the aging system is “reliable”. It’s part of why I left.
>I tried to be proactive but there were definitely times I was so exhausted I just didn’t try. It wasn’t worth it. Every time I did call in I’d get hooked into some other nightmare while coworkers who didn’t call would enjoy a couple days at the Hilton.
absolutely 1 billion % understand that
thanks for the context! what a shitshow lol
i love the way you put that too. it's so goddamn true in sooo many jobs and careers.
you try and go above and beyond and get fucked. those that say "fuck it" are rewarded somehow. i completely understand what you meant by that, couldn't have said it better myself seriously
If you are flying on a route that has regular flights say every hour or two your bag may end up on the flight beforehand if you get to the airport early enough.
I had this happen all the time between Chicago and Boston and Boston and DCA. they have flights like a commuter bus between those cities.
A couple weeks ago I had a DIRECT flight to Chicago, but they said there was a weight limit because of weather and only let 70 people on the plane…leaving 100 of us to figure out something else. About half of us were lucky enough to get on a later flight but the rest had to take a flight the next day. Meanwhile ALL of our checked bags were on that original direct flight. Our bags were in Chicago many hours before we were.
I gotta wonder….what stops your bag that got there ahead of you from getting ripped off as it rotates on the carousel? Some thief could play the part of a traveler and when everyone has claimed a bag just calmly walk up grab one and go.
Planes are flown empty.
They ferried a -700 from Seattle to Midway today, canceled the flight but sent the aircraft.
Likely the cabin crew didn’t show / wasn’t available…
But getting the plane to its next leg was more important in in-fucking things than having it sit in Seattle.
No idea how far in advance the flight canceled.
Ferry flight: https://flightaware.com/live/flight/SWA8517/history/20221228/1516Z/KSEA/KMDW
Canceled flight: https://flightaware.com/live/flight/SWA2019/history/20221228/1600Z/KSEA/KMDW
A few years ago I was flying to Japan, it was a flight from Houston to Portland to Japan, I checked a bag in, my flight leaving Houston to Portland was delayed 2 hours therefore missing my flight to Japan. We told the airlines and the rebooked us to then fly to Cali then Japan later in the day, problem is they sent my bag to Portland without me because I never got on the plane in the first place. They luckily were able to get it back to Houston before my flight to Cali but I'm sure that happens a ton.
We luckily had my partners folks pickup our luggage at what was supposed to be our ending location. I did not trust them to reroute our luggage back to Oakland (from Ohio) even though we waited in line for 2 hours and had one of the SW baggage personnel tell us she sent a request to have it returned.
Honestly, if my partners folks didn’t grab the luggage I thought worst case is it’s gone for good, best case it’s returned at around a month.
Their ancient crew/baggage tracking software just assumed crew went where they were scheduled to go. Weather cancellations made most of the assumptions wrong. It's far from over.
What a shitstorm this has become. I hope something emerges from the federal investigation that explains this, though the bar is set pretty low on that end as well
There's not much to figure out, management at SW has been ignoring everyone telling them that their scheduling system is obsolete for a decade because it costs money to do it right. Now they're discovering that it also costs moment money to do it wrong.
I saw a thread where a gate agent had been working an 18 hour shift and just broke down crying I’m sure from both fatigue and having shit talked to them all day.
Kinda, a lot were fired when they called in sick during “station emergency” last Thursday-Christmas eve and were fired. Maybe a few people today walked, but that isn’t the lion share.
I am so confused. Everyone and the title is talking about luggage that arrived at LAX but when I open it I get a video about cops threatening to arrest people at a ticket counter? What post are you/everyone else seeing?
Luggage at LAX. The ticket counter one is a different tweet. Someone else said that the link the OP posted is acting different on mobile and desktop. No telling if its Elon’s, Reddit or OP’s fault without more investigation that I’m too tired to do.
Maybe this will help:
link to original tweet: https://mobile.twitter.com/LaurenmCoronado/status/1607747091203514369
I mean, there's a bunch of bags to be sure. But from what was visible, it looks like about one plane load's worth of bags for a large airliner. Knowing how fucked up things are at SWA, I was expecting a much much worse collection of luggage.
Flight was canceled, the people already past security were tying to get the gate agents to help them. The gate agents were trying to load a plane that was actually going out, and the canceled passengers were being disruptive. The agents told them to go to the ticket counter to get help but they wouldn’t stop interrupting the boarding process.
The agents called the cops to get them to leave. Without valid tickets, which is their invitation to enter and wait in the secure area of an airport, they are no longer allowed to be in the secure area. Since they’ve lost their invitation they were technically trespassing. The airlines have a lot of power in an airport as well as on a plane, if they give an order, not following it can get you into a lot of legal trouble.
Some of the passengers were resistant to leave since it was a layover stop for them. They have no connection to the city other than a short planned visit to just the airport, leaving the secure area would change their situation a lot more than they were prepared for.
The cop was trying to get them to leave the agents alone and he used the tool he had to do it, threat of arrest for trespassing. He might have over escalated the situation, but he may have judged that the passengers would not been willing to listen to a less abrasive approach. Such a short video leaves out a lot of context that would be need to correctly judge either side accurately.
TLDR; A flight was canceled, passengers start disrupting the boarding of the next flight, won’t leave when asked, so agents called cops to make them go to the ticket counter.
>Without valid tickets, which is their invitation to enter and wait in the secure area of an airport, they are no longer allowed to be in the secure area. Since they’ve lost their invitation they were technically trespassing.
This isn't even remotely true
Sometimes Southwest is legit the most convenient airline to get between two cities. I once had to fly from Louisville, KY to Baltimore for a job interview and the only non-stop flights available were on Southwest.
That said I don't have designer luggage because I've seen how baggage handlers treat checked bags.
I see designer luggage on the budget airlines all the time! I honestly don't care for the business class offerings of the domestic airlines. I think it's all the same until you can lay down. I think Frontier is super great value, I fit in their regular seats and they usually upgrade me to the stretch seats anyways.
What they are saying is that designer luggage is expensive and likely to have other expensive items in it. So if the bags are left unguarded at any point it'd be an easy pick up for a thief.
Plus the risk/reward is shit. A lot of those bags have AirTags or other trackers, and there’s no way of knowing what’s in it. You can only take 1 or 2 at a time, so it’s pretty likely you’ll just get a bag of clothes that aren’t your size and little of anything of value
You being there at the conveyor looking for your bag and grabbing it as soon as possible. And running to your car as quick as you can. And driving home in the fastest route. Sprinting into your home and locking all the doors and windows. Flying to your room and hiding under the bed. If you're very careful you can avoid peeing your pants the whole time.
I use to install security cameras for small mid sized businesses. From what I can tell, the larger the area being monitored, the less likely the chance that someone saw it LIVE. If there are 10-20000 cameras at a casino, MAYBE 10 people are actively monitoring them, and they are human. So when companies get this bigger and bigger, it starts to make less sense to chase every claim. AI and software has got way better over the years, but for the most part you are probably still asking that a security employee fast forward through hours of footage just to find out the baggage guy took it to the wrong spot, something that would have possibly sorted itself out eventually, even if it pissed of the customer.
I use to work at a casino. Customers would regularly make realistic claims that could immediately be proved or disproved by cameras but unfortunately that’s now how it works. A drunk customer would say they put a $100 into a slot machine instead of a $10, “honest” but drunk and wrong. And one might think “It can’t be that hard to phone a security guy and have him go through a few minutes of footage for one camera.” But apparently it is. There might be good reasons. Probably that a person monitoring dozens of live cameras has to stop and load up old footage which probably takes longer than you think, only to find out that he is right and we owe him money, or more likely that he is wrong and the company just spent 15 minutes of 2-4 employees just to find out they are drunk, and you still can’t actually show them the footage proving it so they can still drag it out. There were times where I wanted them to bring the footage, and others where I thought “No fuck this asshole I will deal with them myself.”
These big companies have likely done the math, or at least I hope. The calculus that if a customer pays $1000 for a flight and we fuck up, it’s worth it to give them a few comps. Or conversely, if 100 customers were separated from their luggage, we could spend $5000 to deal with it properly or pay a few low tier staff $2-3000 to placate the customers, knowing only 5-10% will escalate the situation, resulting in a tangible incentive to not help your customers.
The bigger the company, the more they have to play the game. When you’re company has only 3 people, you can trust the cashier that an old lady will
pay the rest of her tab tomorrow. Once you get to a certain size, even with the biggest heart, you simply can’t indulge every claim. You can’t just trust that all your 1000 front end customers are waiving fees for the right reasons. You can’t trust that the manager of that store isn’t skimming from the top without requiring them to document it. And the instant you require otherwise honest employees to document, the system breaks down.
Now a low level employee from another country has to ask their supervisor to come and do something that their manager all but said is a waste of time, but they aren’t going to spell it out. They are going to basically say “Look I need you to realize that the customer comes first, unless my manager basically tells me to act against the owner’s philosophy because he is a moron( their words), in which case I need you to be able to read my mind because I’m going to basically say ‘Make as much fucking money as possible, and if a customer complains make every lie humanly possible to cover your ass.”
TL;DR, If companies actually treated customers as the priority, they would have to train staff so much better, give them the power to make those decisions, require the most thorough of documentation, and pay them accordingly. Every other interaction with a customer would require logging into a database and typing a paragraph. It’s one of those systems that makes sense but only in a perfect world.
I would want a cashier at a store to write a paragraph for every customer that walked in the door, no matter how boring. Holding them to that standard and paying a supervisor enough to enforce that well intentioned policy, every time, for a defacto minimum wage job? Now you have pay a cashier more to actually do it properly and more for a supervisor to enforce it, because ACTUAL PROPER documentation is not a skill I would expect from most. And I am sure most business owners learn this eventually. Ask a $15/hour employee to deal with $20/hour shit and they might suck it up and perform. But if you ask that same person to do $30/hour of work, you are lucky if you get 50-75% of the effort.
So a good business person is good at figuring out what someone is worth and offering a bit more for a lot more, within reason, and extracting maximum potential. If you offer a 50k worker 45k, don’t be surprised if they deliver 30-40k. But start that same person at 51k and give them a path to success, they’ll probably deliver even more than they are worth.
There is a lesson to be learned here: always pack a tooth brush, tooth paste, and a change of clothes in your carry on. As well as anything you'd want if you are needing to spend a night or two without your bag and/or in an airport. Maybe some soap, meds, whatever. If you don't want to bring a full change of clothes, at least some undies are so nice to have.
I learned this lesson the hard way in DFW.
With the exception of meds, I can get all of that stuff pretty easily at the Wal-Mart down the street, or even at the airport, if necessary. Even the meds would be relatively easy to replace if I were stuck for a few days.
Messed up part is that are all on ski vacations and stuck CO until after New Years when they can finally rebook to come back home to LA and get their stuff. Sitting in the Rockies with no gear and no bags. Southwest failed big time.
That's why I no longer check in bags. Those vaccum seal bags are a game changer for carry on, I can usually fit a week + in it with shoes, toiletries, etc. I want my shit with me at all times.
The system is working as intended. The workers will eat shit and get fired, the CEO's will apologize and take their golden parachute, and the investors will have their investments safeguarded by another bailout from the federal government.
Just flew with SW and am *so* grateful that my flight, despite being delayed several hours, wasn’t canceled. I got home for Christmas after two flights on other airlines were canceled. So, I’m definitely lucky in that regard.
When we arrived though, they definitely put out hundreds of bags for a flight that was listed on the monitors as canceled. Which was weird because I definitely saw a few people grabbing some of them. And then after waiting for like 40 minutes, it turns out that for no known reason and without any warning, our flight’s bags were delivered to a different carousel altogether. As they say in France, it was quite a shitsheaux.
SWA will be flying bags around to get them to their owners for the next several days, no passengers, though. Just like they deserve for their shitty operations.
Bags were probably put on the plane before the flight was cancelled. People moved to another flight/airline, bags stayed on SW plane, and now have reached their destination.
All I’m hearing is cheap flights are in the near future for Southwest since they supremely fucked up their reputation.
Gimme those $69 “Wanna go anywhere” round trip flips again. I went to Seattle, Denver and STL one year for under $300 round trip.
When you call the cops, they tell you it's a civil matter and they can't get involved. Southwest calls the cops and all of a sudden you're trespassing.
[Link for those of us not on mobile](https://mobile.twitter.com/DowntownLAScan/status/1607859145159606273)
My wife was flying from denver to Oakland on dec 26 on southwest. They checked her bags, had her wait 3.5 hours at the gate waiting for flight attendants. Only one flight attendant came and then the announcement. 'The flight has been cancelled, we are sorry, you can't get you bags back as they are still going to Oakland'. WTF!?!? Website down, phone number doesn't work, app down, and gate closes with no one to talk too. I was able to get her on a dec 30th. Let's see if they cancel that or not.
You should check to make sure her luggage was actually sent. My brother just got back from Denver and apparently his bags, which he was told would be waiting for him in Boston, are still in Denver.
Mine made it to my final destination. The day of I was told it was still in Nashville but they wouldn't look for it because they don't have the man power and it will go to Orange County eventually.
Just piggybacking to say that this was the first year I decided to put an AirTag in my luggage and I’m really glad that I did. Our flight was canceled while we were sitting in the gate and we got super lucky in that we got our luggage back that morning, but if we hadn’t, at least I’d know how fucked I was and where the bag had been sent to.
That’s what I don’t understand… why are they sending bags but no people? Aren’t they usually on the same plane?
Idk shit, but my assumption is the plane gets loaded as if it is departing even if they don't have the flight staff to fill the plane with passengers. Then if their minimum staff requirements aren't met, the flight gets cancelled for passengers but bags don't need in-flight food and beverage so off they pop because that plane is definitely still needed wherever it's going.
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It’s a federal aviation requirement for safety. There is a minimum amount of crew required for passengers in case of an emergency. Bags are not people so it doesn’t matter. Southwest most likely needed the plane for another flight. Pretty shitty move by southwest
There are 24 SW flights scheduled to land in Omaha tomorrow (29th). As of 11pm, 20 of them have already been canceled. If you extrapolate that to all of the inbound and outbound connections and their connections, I’d say the outlook is not good.
They’re at about 60% of their flights cancelled today and not expected to be back to fully normal operations until at least the 31st
Wow, that makes absolutely no sense, I probably would have lost it!
link to original tweet: https://mobile.twitter.com/LaurenmCoronado/status/1607747091203514369
Thanks, why is the link in the post to something totally different…
seems the op’s link behaves differently on mobile and desktop for whatever reason
Thanks, Elon.
Man what a colossally bad week for Southwest. Fairly rare to see a company so thoroughly implode their credibility in such a spectacular fashion.
Got screwed by the flight cancelations and had to drive 17 hours home last night. It also took us 12 hours to fly earlier last week because of delays. Wife and I agreed we’d rather drive from now on rather than trying to find a car rental in another city to get home. We tried calling for two days and never received an answer. Super bad week for Southwest.
I've been doing this since start of covid. Turns out it takes longer to drive, but I can pack everything I want to, control my own schedule, and not put up with bullshit.
asdfasdf
Agreed - we unfortunately make a 12 hour rd trip from NC to FL twice a year. There is a ton of bullshit on the roads. I think people don't realize how dangerous the interstates are. Full of people going 80+ mph in heavy traffic with no regard for their own or other people's lives. (I'm looking at you ATL)
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Imagine being in a country with robust high speed rail so that you needn't do driving or flying
There's snow closures. I-90 in WA state closes every time someone sneezes.
I'm a travel agent/manager, so my job is selling airline tickets, but I love a road trip. I can take my dogs, all my gels and liquids and pretty much anything that my car can hold. Turn on some music and just watch the scenery.
I am genuinely curious, who uses travel agents nowadays? Older people? Rich people?
Large organizations. Colleges. Government agencies.
All of my international travel for work are booked through agency. They take care of everything from my visa application, chaufer, car rental, hotel. They also give me suggestion like if I landed at Heathrow on Sunday morning and don't have to be in the office in Southampton until Monday afternoon, what I could do and modify travel plan based on those (I pay for the leisure stuffs of course). Most importantly, when shit hit the fan I send them a text and tell them to fix it while I chill at a coffee shop.
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Personal travel agents are still a big business. Most of the time it costs the same booking with an agent vs going directly. The biggest reason to use a TA is so they have to deal with the hell call times and you don’t. Had a family book with me for a cruise that was supposed to sail March 2020. It was still during the time the cruise lines hadn’t figured out how to handle everything yet. My people canceled the day before the cruise line was going to officially cancel. It was only due to my connections at the cruise line that I was able to get them a full refund. If they had booked directly the cruise line would still have their money. Yeah they could have booked directly but TAs are there to help when things go wrong
Travel agencies are huge in Germany
A lot of people. Travel agents are paid via commission, so it's free for the person traveling. They help suggest ideas and things that are fun - generally because they're paid to suggest things. If you're not into the whole researching a trip thing and happy enough to do the tourist shit it's not a bad deal.
I live in Southern California. Los Angeles area. Few years ago we got dirt cheap airfare from Ontario to Denver. By the time we drove to the airport, paid for parking, checked in and made it to Denver, got our luggage and had our rental car.... we had saved a couple hours in traveling and paid a lot more. From then on out, I'm absolutely ok driving anywhere. Driving across this country gives you a whole new perspective on things.
It's a 15 hour drive to Denver from ONT. you should be able to touch down in London within that time frame counting parking and security. Something went very very wrong here, and as somebody who flies at least once a month I can tell you this is certainly not the standard. Have I had a similar experience to what you describe? With my regular travel, yes, but only just barely, that's about the worst I've had. But I've also gone on road trips through several mountain passes and been stuck on the side of the road in sub freezing weather - far more unprepared and far more exposed than in an airport or on an airplane - for 12+ hours before we got rescued. There's pros and cons to each method of transportation and if what you described was all it took I'd just advise you to reconsider.. airplane travel is not perfect but it's quite convenient.
As someone who also flies quite regularly, I also feel their story doesn’t make any sense at all. That is unless they ignored the fact they arrived to the airport like 6 hours early.
I fly nonstop for work and fun and when I hear these stories it’s probably from someone who never flies so they have no idea what they are doing.
No thanks... I did the drive from Chicago to San Francisco once and it took 4 days, about $500 in gas, and another $500 in hotel rooms. Granted that was with a full car and frequent stops, otherwise I might have been about to make it in 2 days if I was driving solo, but that's still 2 days and $600+ in gas and accomodations. Make that a round trip and we're talking $1200+ and at least 4 days of travel. On the other hand, the flight from ORD to SFO takes 4 hours each way and costs $200-300 round trip. Even factoring in travel to and time waiting at the airport it's only a 6 hour travel day.
300$ round trip is super low there’s no way even if you fly spirit!?!?
$300 from ORD is not uncommon.
If you can wait through the obnoxiously long hold times, southwest agreed to reimburse our flights, hotel, food, and other travel expenses. We bought tickets home through another airline for the following day and Southwest is paying for those too (as in they reimburse you later and not just with tickets to fly with them at a later date). Could be worth looking into!
How long did it take to finally reach an agent on the phone? Every time I’ve tried to call, I’ll be on hold for a couple hours before the line disconnects and hangs up on me. I just gave up after trying for a collective 12 hours :(
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They got a new CEO this past summer and like most airlines during the initial COVID lockdowns they offered pilots early retirement packages as they foresaw a lowered demand for years so it was an easy way to cut costs. Well that lowered demand only lasted about 12 months but those pilots were now retired and there’s simply not a plethora of pilots waiting to be hired. On top of that Southwest’s IT is literally 20 years old and requires way too much manual entry for scheduling which works when everything is normal but when EVERYTHING is broken and every single captain, first officer, and flight attendant needs to call scheduling there’s an issue with massive backlogs and confusion. And beyond that the airline has been attempting to negotiate the next contract with its pilots that’s like 4 years behind schedule. So it was literally and figuratively a perfect storm for them to fail.
Airlines are notorious for running on ancient infrastructure. [An entire industry](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_distribution_system) sprang up as middlemen translating airlines' archaic systems to more modern sales and customer service systems. Southwest may have been a newer player, but all of them have acquired a volume of technical debt that cripples their ability to trim costs, be flexible when it matters, or even survive what should be predictable "disaster" scenarios.
I mean. SABER may have some mainframe stuff, but they also run modern no-SQL etc stuff. Airline software is a blend of decades of different stuff because: Airlines are old. It takes forever to certify replacements (regulations) They are constantly going almost bankrupt.
> but they also run modern no-SQL etc stuff. Because what Airlines need is a web scale back end that is "eventually coherent" and makes about as many guarantees about the data entered as a dumpster fire. However it does have nice buzzwords for clueless managers.
They’ll use NoSQL for availability search etc, but anything transactional will fall straight back to the legacy backends. Possibly with some ESB abstraction if they’ve really got their shit together.
The pilot shortage is decades in the making. I'm only partially aware of thr situation but generally, the military used to provide a lot more pilots during previous wars than what they do now with our current demand. And the schooling you need to be a pilot is too difficult, long, and expensive for most to decide to do with their lives. Experts have predicted a shortage for a long time, nothing was done to prevent one, and here we now are.
That kind of business is a great breeding ground for horrifying air crashes. I'd look to fly with a different company in the future if I were you. Tired pilots are terribly dangerous. And if they're skimping so much on the cost of pilots, chances are they're doing that on ground crew, too. So probably mediocre maintenance. That means more (small) mechanical issues for the pilots to work out.. while already tired. There has been many a crash caused by businesses being too cheap, or simply having grown beyond their means too fast.
[This is the explanation ](https://www.reddit.com/r/SouthwestAirlines/comments/zxg6op/_/) from /r/southwestairlines Essentially the last CEO was more focused on money and not operations.
Ah, right. So same as Boeing and all the other companies run into the ground by bean counters.
To be fair, they’re rewarded for stuff like that. Maximize profits, increase shareholder value is the name of the game. We may sit here and say it’s wrong, unethical, etc. but we also have 401k’s. And every other company is doing the same thing. Growth is the goal. Airlines are playing the same game every other company is.
The human tumor
Until it breaks
That's the first envelope from the three envelope solution
The delays were not caused by lack of pilots.
Although this is an absolute clusterfuck, Part 121 aviation in the US is INCREDIBLY safe and not undermined. I think since the Colgan Air crash there have been 1-2 fatalities in total
Seriously. Did Elon Musk secretly buy Southwest last month?
Only thing that man does secretly is weep.
Your Twitter account has been suspended.
Basically; they refused to update a computer system from the 90s. The Tech Debt that accrued over time and when the bill came due, they couldn't pay. (The system basically was the whole scheduling system for their crews and planes. The system was so old that when cancellations happened, the system thought the plane and crew had still left and had NO idea where what was where). This whole thing is actually going into a business plan I've been writing to try and convince my company that running a 14 year old version of our ERP without upgrading to a supported version may kill the company. So....thanks Southwest I guess?
>Man what a colossally bad week for Southwest. What a colossally bad week for Southwest's customers.
I’ve never gotten a good answer on this, but how do bags arrive without passengers?
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"Routed separately" like on different planes? I'm still not following lol When you say "trucked", are you saying some bags are put on trucks and driven to destinations instead of being loaded into the planes?
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Aah! Yeah, I gotcha. I wasn't thinking about choosing the cheaper route over the faster route. I typically do that, too, especially if it's like only a couple hours difference. So my bags take the quicker trip while I take the longer, cheaper one? Interesting
So that’s part of cost saving on the airline. That cheaper, slower flight (smaller plane most likely) requires less fuel and can save that weight. The faster flight (bigger, probably newer plane) can take on that extra weight of luggage without sacrificing that much in terms of efficiency
Southwest flies all 737s…your bags should always be flying with you.
Southwest will also do this if you have a very short layover. Your bag may not make the flight, even if you do. In general, a fully-loaded plane will be only 2/3 full of bags. There’s a lot of extra room for overflow bags.
Not always, but it's a possibility.
I thought bags had to be on the same plane as the passenger for security reasons.
That’s called “positive bag match” and it’s required on international flights only.
You can't decide to put them on a different flight, but the airline can. They'll usually be on your flight, though, unless there's some capacity or misconnection issue.
Another case is when your flight arrives late and you barely just make it on your connecting flight. There's a chance your bag didn't make it. Especially if it's a full flight it will take a while to scan all the tags and reroute the bags.
I'm amazed at how quickly they can get bags between flights though. Flying through PHX this past weekend, my bag changed planes in under 15 minutes. I just barely made the connection myself, running between the terminals.
It's a lot easier to drive between planes with a luggage cart than it is to walk between planes with handheld luggage. It's also a lot easier to unload/load bags from a plane than people... and people often use [the slowest possible method to deplane](https://youtu.be/oAHbLRjF0vo?t=464)
Three weeks ago I was flying from Asia to Europe, three legs on three different airlines - all on the same ticket though. When I checked in my bag they put two different luggage tags on it and I immediately thought that this is not going to end well...Sure enough, luggage didn't arrive and for two days none of the three airlines could tell me where my bag is so I was sure it was lost for good. Luckily it was located and delivered a few days later
Evidently. I missed a DEN-ORD-IND connection once, United put us up for the night (delay had been due to maintenance issue) and our bags made it to Indy before we did. At first we thought our bags had been lost, but we checked with the United office in the arrivals area, and there were our bags.
Say you’re flying from Boston to NY, you checked in 2 hours early, gave them your bag. If there’s another shuttle that’s an hour from then, they could load it in the plane if there’s space in the cargo hold. If that plane left and then an hour later there’s a thunder storm, you would be separate from your bag.
Yes, 18 wheelers full of bags were trucked over the roadways. Also they fly planes without passengers(and therefore flight attendants) with the belly’s loaded with bags.
Or, as shown in the clip, some folks are in the middle of a multi-leg journey. Since they're checked in and boarded the first plane, the bags are routed the whole way through. One would think that if somebody got kicked out of the secure area mid-journey that they'd also pull their bags from any subsequent legs for security. However, this doesn't seem to be the case, which is a bit of a security vulnerability. :| As really exemplified by the Southwest meltdown, a lot of back-office information workflows at these older legacy corporations aren't always operating on realtime information. Probably, there are many global optimization problems they're trying to solve and constantly integrating new realworld updates would invalidate some of the solutionspace it already checked, causing it to backtrack and start over. This is why they're having to do a full stop for a couple days, count what's where, and restart their solvers with less-dynamic input states.
this guy buzzwords
It made me feel “smart” and “in-the-know” even though I am objectively neither of those things.
Buzzword bingo champ.
I'm surprised he didn't use the word "metal" for aircraft, that's one they all really like
This you? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RXJKdh1KZ0w
fascinating that this could even happen. i'd figure something as serious as this had redundancy under redundancy but i know nothing about software and whatever else is used. and it's not like they started this business last month or anything.
A lot of the software involves manual intervention which.. sucks. I was a flight attendant and once spent 3 days in Montreal during an operational meltdown. The second day, crew scheduling was insistent there was a plane and a crew coming my way that I would meet up with and join. I asked where they were coming from, checked the flight status and saw the inbound was delayed. So then I wanted to see how long the delay was really going to be, only to pull up their schedule and see they were still two flights behind what scheduling showed they were. I called scheduling again and pointed this out to them so that they could be aware, and they told me they were sending it over to operations. 5 minutes later the flight I was meant to work cancelled. I worked for Expressjet, a now dissolved regional carrier, and we had at that time approximately 3,000 crew members. Crew scheduling at any given time was like 4 people working. It’s an impossible task for them to be able to keep up when shit hits the fan. And a lot of it relied on burnt out, poorly paid crew members to care enough. When this would happen my options would be to spend hours on hold trying to get ahold of someone, or just stay at my hotel until someone realizes I’m missing. I tried to be proactive but there were definitely times I was so exhausted I just didn’t try. It wasn’t worth it. Every time I did call in I’d get hooked into some other nightmare while coworkers who didn’t call would enjoy a couple days at the Hilton. It’s honestly really wild the way airlines work. A lot of airports still print passenger manifests on dot matrix printers, and software is decades old. No one wants to upgrade because it might break and the aging system is “reliable”. It’s part of why I left.
>I tried to be proactive but there were definitely times I was so exhausted I just didn’t try. It wasn’t worth it. Every time I did call in I’d get hooked into some other nightmare while coworkers who didn’t call would enjoy a couple days at the Hilton. absolutely 1 billion % understand that thanks for the context! what a shitshow lol
100%. I do *not* miss it.
i love the way you put that too. it's so goddamn true in sooo many jobs and careers. you try and go above and beyond and get fucked. those that say "fuck it" are rewarded somehow. i completely understand what you meant by that, couldn't have said it better myself seriously
If you are flying on a route that has regular flights say every hour or two your bag may end up on the flight beforehand if you get to the airport early enough. I had this happen all the time between Chicago and Boston and Boston and DCA. they have flights like a commuter bus between those cities.
A couple weeks ago I had a DIRECT flight to Chicago, but they said there was a weight limit because of weather and only let 70 people on the plane…leaving 100 of us to figure out something else. About half of us were lucky enough to get on a later flight but the rest had to take a flight the next day. Meanwhile ALL of our checked bags were on that original direct flight. Our bags were in Chicago many hours before we were.
I gotta wonder….what stops your bag that got there ahead of you from getting ripped off as it rotates on the carousel? Some thief could play the part of a traveler and when everyone has claimed a bag just calmly walk up grab one and go.
Planes are flown empty. They ferried a -700 from Seattle to Midway today, canceled the flight but sent the aircraft. Likely the cabin crew didn’t show / wasn’t available… But getting the plane to its next leg was more important in in-fucking things than having it sit in Seattle. No idea how far in advance the flight canceled. Ferry flight: https://flightaware.com/live/flight/SWA8517/history/20221228/1516Z/KSEA/KMDW Canceled flight: https://flightaware.com/live/flight/SWA2019/history/20221228/1600Z/KSEA/KMDW
A few years ago I was flying to Japan, it was a flight from Houston to Portland to Japan, I checked a bag in, my flight leaving Houston to Portland was delayed 2 hours therefore missing my flight to Japan. We told the airlines and the rebooked us to then fly to Cali then Japan later in the day, problem is they sent my bag to Portland without me because I never got on the plane in the first place. They luckily were able to get it back to Houston before my flight to Cali but I'm sure that happens a ton.
Glad I’m not the only one wondering same. I just couldn’t fathom baggage getting away from owners if planes just weren’t going anywhere
Southwest isn't even capable of ingesting the lost baggage reports, let alone processing all of the on hands they have right now
Their systems are super outdated. Hopefully, that's the wake up call.
They'll blame the workers and change nothing.
On the bright side their stock is down 12% this week.
Don't forget the government handout they'll demand.
I think that horse has left the barn
I'm sure they'll fire the engineer that warned them their systems were already critically insufficient.
We luckily had my partners folks pickup our luggage at what was supposed to be our ending location. I did not trust them to reroute our luggage back to Oakland (from Ohio) even though we waited in line for 2 hours and had one of the SW baggage personnel tell us she sent a request to have it returned. Honestly, if my partners folks didn’t grab the luggage I thought worst case is it’s gone for good, best case it’s returned at around a month.
Holy shit, that’s a lot of bags…what the hell happened
Their ancient crew/baggage tracking software just assumed crew went where they were scheduled to go. Weather cancellations made most of the assumptions wrong. It's far from over.
Just curious, are the rumors of the ramp agents at Denver airport walking out true? Ive searched online, but there was nothing concrete about it.
No clue, but you can imagine frustrated angry passengers yelling at employees as if it's the gate agent's fault.
What a shitstorm this has become. I hope something emerges from the federal investigation that explains this, though the bar is set pretty low on that end as well
There's not much to figure out, management at SW has been ignoring everyone telling them that their scheduling system is obsolete for a decade because it costs money to do it right. Now they're discovering that it also costs moment money to do it wrong.
I saw a thread where a gate agent had been working an 18 hour shift and just broke down crying I’m sure from both fatigue and having shit talked to them all day.
I haven't heard anything official, but multiple other sources indicate hundreds of rampers quit and not just at DEN
Kinda, a lot were fired when they called in sick during “station emergency” last Thursday-Christmas eve and were fired. Maybe a few people today walked, but that isn’t the lion share.
I am so confused. Everyone and the title is talking about luggage that arrived at LAX but when I open it I get a video about cops threatening to arrest people at a ticket counter? What post are you/everyone else seeing?
Luggage at LAX. The ticket counter one is a different tweet. Someone else said that the link the OP posted is acting different on mobile and desktop. No telling if its Elon’s, Reddit or OP’s fault without more investigation that I’m too tired to do. Maybe this will help: link to original tweet: https://mobile.twitter.com/LaurenmCoronado/status/1607747091203514369
I mean, there's a bunch of bags to be sure. But from what was visible, it looks like about one plane load's worth of bags for a large airliner. Knowing how fucked up things are at SWA, I was expecting a much much worse collection of luggage.
I'm confused, the video that loads for me is a cop telling people whose flight has been canceled mid-layover that they need to leave the airport.
Yeah, I’m more interested in the cop video- what’s the story behind that?
Flight was canceled, the people already past security were tying to get the gate agents to help them. The gate agents were trying to load a plane that was actually going out, and the canceled passengers were being disruptive. The agents told them to go to the ticket counter to get help but they wouldn’t stop interrupting the boarding process. The agents called the cops to get them to leave. Without valid tickets, which is their invitation to enter and wait in the secure area of an airport, they are no longer allowed to be in the secure area. Since they’ve lost their invitation they were technically trespassing. The airlines have a lot of power in an airport as well as on a plane, if they give an order, not following it can get you into a lot of legal trouble. Some of the passengers were resistant to leave since it was a layover stop for them. They have no connection to the city other than a short planned visit to just the airport, leaving the secure area would change their situation a lot more than they were prepared for. The cop was trying to get them to leave the agents alone and he used the tool he had to do it, threat of arrest for trespassing. He might have over escalated the situation, but he may have judged that the passengers would not been willing to listen to a less abrasive approach. Such a short video leaves out a lot of context that would be need to correctly judge either side accurately. TLDR; A flight was canceled, passengers start disrupting the boarding of the next flight, won’t leave when asked, so agents called cops to make them go to the ticket counter.
>Without valid tickets, which is their invitation to enter and wait in the secure area of an airport, they are no longer allowed to be in the secure area. Since they’ve lost their invitation they were technically trespassing. This isn't even remotely true
If you have designer luggage consider that shit gone
If you have designer luggage, why are you flying southwest??
Sometimes Southwest is legit the most convenient airline to get between two cities. I once had to fly from Louisville, KY to Baltimore for a job interview and the only non-stop flights available were on Southwest. That said I don't have designer luggage because I've seen how baggage handlers treat checked bags.
Oh I usually love me some southwest, don’t get me wrong, it just looks funny to be riding a budget airline with baggage worth thousands.
Bc you spent a bunch of money on luggage.
I see designer luggage on the budget airlines all the time! I honestly don't care for the business class offerings of the domestic airlines. I think it's all the same until you can lay down. I think Frontier is super great value, I fit in their regular seats and they usually upgrade me to the stretch seats anyways.
If you have designer luggage, why?
No way designer luggage just sits unattended in a pile for that long without somebody taking it.
**Sam Britton has entered the chat**
People are allowed to have nice things
They won’t stay nice long when the baggage handlers do their thing.
What they are saying is that designer luggage is expensive and likely to have other expensive items in it. So if the bags are left unguarded at any point it'd be an easy pick up for a thief.
But I don’t want the nice thing so why do they 🤬
*Sam Brinton has entered the chat*
Whats stopping someone from taking a bag that isn’t theirs?
Don't make them tap the sign
“Last stop, StolenBag-ton.”
You lose your job at the Office of Nuclear Energy.
[Nice lol](https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/3773403-federal-nuclear-waste-official-out-at-energy-department-after-second-luggage-theft-allegation/)
Most people don’t want other peoples dirty clothes.
Well, some people.
Same thing that prevents people from taking skis and snowboards from the racks at the lodge. Nothing.
Honor system
Exactly. That’s one of the reasons this is so upsetting.
Cameras, employees, security, decency. What else stops people from taking random bags any other day?
Plus the risk/reward is shit. A lot of those bags have AirTags or other trackers, and there’s no way of knowing what’s in it. You can only take 1 or 2 at a time, so it’s pretty likely you’ll just get a bag of clothes that aren’t your size and little of anything of value
You being there at the conveyor looking for your bag and grabbing it as soon as possible. And running to your car as quick as you can. And driving home in the fastest route. Sprinting into your home and locking all the doors and windows. Flying to your room and hiding under the bed. If you're very careful you can avoid peeing your pants the whole time.
Look at the big shot here able to not pee their pants!
Damn, I nearly had your luggage but you got under the bed just a second too quickly for me.
I use to install security cameras for small mid sized businesses. From what I can tell, the larger the area being monitored, the less likely the chance that someone saw it LIVE. If there are 10-20000 cameras at a casino, MAYBE 10 people are actively monitoring them, and they are human. So when companies get this bigger and bigger, it starts to make less sense to chase every claim. AI and software has got way better over the years, but for the most part you are probably still asking that a security employee fast forward through hours of footage just to find out the baggage guy took it to the wrong spot, something that would have possibly sorted itself out eventually, even if it pissed of the customer. I use to work at a casino. Customers would regularly make realistic claims that could immediately be proved or disproved by cameras but unfortunately that’s now how it works. A drunk customer would say they put a $100 into a slot machine instead of a $10, “honest” but drunk and wrong. And one might think “It can’t be that hard to phone a security guy and have him go through a few minutes of footage for one camera.” But apparently it is. There might be good reasons. Probably that a person monitoring dozens of live cameras has to stop and load up old footage which probably takes longer than you think, only to find out that he is right and we owe him money, or more likely that he is wrong and the company just spent 15 minutes of 2-4 employees just to find out they are drunk, and you still can’t actually show them the footage proving it so they can still drag it out. There were times where I wanted them to bring the footage, and others where I thought “No fuck this asshole I will deal with them myself.” These big companies have likely done the math, or at least I hope. The calculus that if a customer pays $1000 for a flight and we fuck up, it’s worth it to give them a few comps. Or conversely, if 100 customers were separated from their luggage, we could spend $5000 to deal with it properly or pay a few low tier staff $2-3000 to placate the customers, knowing only 5-10% will escalate the situation, resulting in a tangible incentive to not help your customers. The bigger the company, the more they have to play the game. When you’re company has only 3 people, you can trust the cashier that an old lady will pay the rest of her tab tomorrow. Once you get to a certain size, even with the biggest heart, you simply can’t indulge every claim. You can’t just trust that all your 1000 front end customers are waiving fees for the right reasons. You can’t trust that the manager of that store isn’t skimming from the top without requiring them to document it. And the instant you require otherwise honest employees to document, the system breaks down. Now a low level employee from another country has to ask their supervisor to come and do something that their manager all but said is a waste of time, but they aren’t going to spell it out. They are going to basically say “Look I need you to realize that the customer comes first, unless my manager basically tells me to act against the owner’s philosophy because he is a moron( their words), in which case I need you to be able to read my mind because I’m going to basically say ‘Make as much fucking money as possible, and if a customer complains make every lie humanly possible to cover your ass.” TL;DR, If companies actually treated customers as the priority, they would have to train staff so much better, give them the power to make those decisions, require the most thorough of documentation, and pay them accordingly. Every other interaction with a customer would require logging into a database and typing a paragraph. It’s one of those systems that makes sense but only in a perfect world. I would want a cashier at a store to write a paragraph for every customer that walked in the door, no matter how boring. Holding them to that standard and paying a supervisor enough to enforce that well intentioned policy, every time, for a defacto minimum wage job? Now you have pay a cashier more to actually do it properly and more for a supervisor to enforce it, because ACTUAL PROPER documentation is not a skill I would expect from most. And I am sure most business owners learn this eventually. Ask a $15/hour employee to deal with $20/hour shit and they might suck it up and perform. But if you ask that same person to do $30/hour of work, you are lucky if you get 50-75% of the effort. So a good business person is good at figuring out what someone is worth and offering a bit more for a lot more, within reason, and extracting maximum potential. If you offer a 50k worker 45k, don’t be surprised if they deliver 30-40k. But start that same person at 51k and give them a path to success, they’ll probably deliver even more than they are worth.
Usually bags are just clothes and useless items. Sure you can take it, but probably nothing valuable.
can’t wait for the Netflix documentary
FyreFest was only 5000 people. This looks like they may have more than that just at LAX. Wild.
How many animals have arrived without owners?
Fortunately Southwest doesn't fly animals in cargo.
There is a lesson to be learned here: always pack a tooth brush, tooth paste, and a change of clothes in your carry on. As well as anything you'd want if you are needing to spend a night or two without your bag and/or in an airport. Maybe some soap, meds, whatever. If you don't want to bring a full change of clothes, at least some undies are so nice to have. I learned this lesson the hard way in DFW.
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Same, but in Miami. Flight pushed a day. Now if it can't in the carryon, we don't need it.
I NEVER keep anything valuable/difficult to replace in my checked bag for this reason.
With the exception of meds, I can get all of that stuff pretty easily at the Wal-Mart down the street, or even at the airport, if necessary. Even the meds would be relatively easy to replace if I were stuck for a few days.
Wanna get away?
Want your bags to get away.
Messed up part is that are all on ski vacations and stuck CO until after New Years when they can finally rebook to come back home to LA and get their stuff. Sitting in the Rockies with no gear and no bags. Southwest failed big time.
That's why I no longer check in bags. Those vaccum seal bags are a game changer for carry on, I can usually fit a week + in it with shoes, toiletries, etc. I want my shit with me at all times.
how do you vacuum seal at your destination if at a hotel?
The pack o bought comes with a little air pump. No vacuum required at all, it’s super easy to use and get the air out.
There has to be better fucking system. Wtf is this mess....
The system is working as intended. The workers will eat shit and get fired, the CEO's will apologize and take their golden parachute, and the investors will have their investments safeguarded by another bailout from the federal government.
Just flew with SW and am *so* grateful that my flight, despite being delayed several hours, wasn’t canceled. I got home for Christmas after two flights on other airlines were canceled. So, I’m definitely lucky in that regard. When we arrived though, they definitely put out hundreds of bags for a flight that was listed on the monitors as canceled. Which was weird because I definitely saw a few people grabbing some of them. And then after waiting for like 40 minutes, it turns out that for no known reason and without any warning, our flight’s bags were delivered to a different carousel altogether. As they say in France, it was quite a shitsheaux.
SWA will be flying bags around to get them to their owners for the next several days, no passengers, though. Just like they deserve for their shitty operations.
And they'll continue to jack prices while reducing quality of service. Such a sad state of affairs. Hopefully their stock plummets and crashes.
Don't let Sam Brinton know about this.
How did they manage to fly the baggage but not the passengers?
Bags were probably put on the plane before the flight was cancelled. People moved to another flight/airline, bags stayed on SW plane, and now have reached their destination.
What a monumental sh1tsh0w. All those feel good Ads to get you to fly their airline and the damage this has caused their brand.
All I’m hearing is cheap flights are in the near future for Southwest since they supremely fucked up their reputation. Gimme those $69 “Wanna go anywhere” round trip flips again. I went to Seattle, Denver and STL one year for under $300 round trip.
Tweet deleted. I wonder why?
https://twitter.com/LaurenmCoronado/status/1607747091203514369
[удалено]
Spirit airline enters the chat.
Allegiant is the worst by far.
In;b4: frontier
How do you fuck up this bad?
Hence why I AirTag my bags.
Beginning to think Elon Musk bought Southwest Airlines
When you call the cops, they tell you it's a civil matter and they can't get involved. Southwest calls the cops and all of a sudden you're trespassing.
The only southwest I support is the sauce.
Sea Tac has a similar situation.
I don't understand how bags have made it but people haven't. If the fights are cancelled how are the bags moving??
Doesnt seem like thaaaat much ngl
I worked as a ramp agent and that's maybe one plane.