CHICAGO — Exhausted vacation travelers were left to sleep on airport floors, take long bus trips or abandon flights altogether on Tuesday as the resulting crash collapsed. Thousands of Southwest Airlines flights canceled extended to another day.
With nearly two-thirds of all Southwest flights canceled again on Tuesday, many families were looking for any way to get home after visiting relatives at Christmas. Some, like Isabella Carvajal, never got to reach their loved ones in the first place.
Ms. Carvajal, 20, spent Christmas Day at Chicago Midway International Airport and has been sleeping in the passenger terminal for the last two nights after she flew there from Miami and learned her connecting flight to New York had been cancelled.
“I spent my entire vacation at the airport,” she said on Tuesday. “I get a few minutes of sleep here and there but not much.”
Ms. Carvajal abandoned plans to see her family, but she still couldn’t get home. She said Southwest reimbursed her for half the price of her ticket and told her she couldn’t book another flight to Miami until Monday. She plans to take the Greyhound bus from Chicago to Orlando over the next couple of days.
“The Southwest has failed a lot of people,” she said.
The airline disaster came after freezing temperatures and snow swept much of the country last week. While other airlines recovered, Southwest I struggled to solve passenger problemscanceling more than 70 percent of flights on Monday and 64 percent on Tuesday, According to FlightAware. By Tuesday evening, the company had already canceled at least 61 percent of its flights for Wednesday. The airline apologized, calling its performance “unacceptable”, and the Department of Transportation began scrutinizing the airline’s cancellations.
As travelers sought alternative routes, horror stories emerged of ruined vacations, lost luggage and long, jittery customer service lines.
Many passengers were able to take initial flights only to be stuck at connecting airports hours away from their home and destination.
Deepak Surendran Pillai said he and his wife were planning to take their 11-year-old daughter on a grand tour of Florida — from Disney World to Miami to Everglades National Park — but had to cancel everything when they flew from Oakland to Las Vegas and then ended up stranded. There is a Christmas Eve amidst a flurry of cancellations.
Mr. SurendranPillai, 41, who lives in Alameda, California, and works for a tech company, finally resigned himself to the fact that his family would have to postpone their trip altogether. But somehow the family’s bags—including one full of wrapped Christmas presents for his daughter Nima—were put on the trip without her.
The family spent the night at the Las Vegas hotel, and Mr. SurendranPillai put a pair of earrings under his daughter’s pillow – from Santa Claus – to wake her up on Christmas Day, one of the few gifts he kept in his bag.
Southwest customer service agents rebooked mr. SurendranPillai and his family are on a series of flights on Sunday, all of them cancelled, until they finally manage to get the last three seats on a plane to the San Francisco Bay Area.
“All we did from noon until 7 in the morning, we didn’t sit anywhere – we just stood in lines,” said the master. Surendran Pillai said.
When the family returned home, Mr. Surendran Pillai said his daughter had tears in her eyes, thinking she didn’t get the one thing she wanted: a pair of red Converse shoes.
“She’s like, I didn’t ask for much. I just ordered red Converse shoes.” Remembers Surendran Pillai. “I had to tell her, ‘I bought these for you. Santa didn’t get those, so they’re in our luggage.’”
At Los Angeles International Airport on Tuesday, Carol and Mark Shepherd sat flanked by their suitcases at the Southwest baggage claim terminal, hoping they could fly back home to Pittsburgh after visiting their daughter for the holidays.
They’ve been checking Southwest’s website over and over—at breakfast and in the car on the way to the airport—and it shows that the first connecting flight, to Las Vegas, was still on schedule. But 15 minutes before boarding was due to begin, the gate agent announced that it had been cancelled.
The couple said they were told Southwest wouldn’t be able to book another flight to Pittsburgh until next Tuesday. Needing to get home to meet their son, who is visiting from New York, they paid $1,700 for two Delta Air Line tickets to fly on Wednesday, which Ms. Shepherd, 66, called it a “ridiculous amount of money”.
“It is very strange why this airline has had all these problems,” said the master. Shepherd, 66, said of Southwest. “We’ve had weather delays but we’ve never seen a situation like this.”
The collapse across Southwest’s network has been called the largest in the company’s history. After last week’s storm caused widespread cancellations, Southwest was unable to redirect crews and passengers to new flights due to an inadequate computer system and the airline’s unique “point-to-point” model that does not return planes to major hubs.
At Baltimore Washington International Airport, passengers formed a long line at the baggage claim customer service counter in hopes of locating their luggage.
Among those in line was Helena Dahlen, who knew to expect a long wait and brought her pink camping chair to sit. After several hectic days of travel troubles, Ms. Dahlin, 59, has abandoned plans to fly to Los Angeles to see friends and family and is now looking through her luggage.
Her first flight, Southwest, was canceled on Christmas Eve, but she rebooked with the airline for Monday and hitched a ride to Nashville. But when she arrived, the next leg of her flight had been cancelled. The only option, I eventually learned, was to go back to Baltimore and call it quits.
“I’m done,” Mrs. On Tuesday, Dahlin said the road is still from the front of the line after three hours. “I have PTSD”
Other passengers in line lamented the time they lost with family due to the cancellation.
Taylor Corner had hoped to take a longer vacation with his daughter, who lives in Massachusetts, but his flight was canceled Monday morning on a Southwest Airlines flight from Baltimore to Hartford, Connecticut. Then the flight he rebooked for the evening was cancelled.
Mr. Corner, 34, of Houston, is training to be a pediatric cardiologist, and said he hasn’t gotten much time away from work. Although he was spending Christmas with his family, he said spending a few more days with his daughter would have meant a lot, given his schedule and the distance between them. Mr. Korner’s mother was planning to join them.
“I get a little vacation,” he said, “but my mom was going to travel with me.” “It would have been nice and special to her, too.”
