@Austin_pert98 wrote:
Hey all,
Yesterday I was traveling Flight 278 FLL-BNA. Delayed roughly 30 minutes at time of boarding. Boarding proceeds seemingly normally. But once the plane is fully boarded, the cabin door isn't closed and nothing seems to be proceeding in regards to our departure, and this remains so for at least a half hour before we're told something by the captain something along the lines that during boarding, two agents were simultaneously working on boarding the aircraft (?) and that a passenger's reservation was somehow invalidated. In order to leave, the passenger's itinerary had to be rebuilt in the system. The pilots and flight attendants claimed they had never seen this sort of issue ever before. We ultimately sat at the gate fully boarded for roughly 90 minutes before this issue was resolved, and left about two hours late. Flight itself went fine, other than a 20ish-minute wait for a gate at BNA.
Anyone here familiar with this type of issue? Or why we had to solve this seemingly non-safety issue before leaving?
Thanks!
I never experienced this specifically but this appears to be an IT glitch that could have caused the corrupted "invalid" reservation data (this is a guess; I could be wrong but this is an educated guess). Having some basic background in IT and working with company ERP software at my work, I understand the possibility of an extended gate delay to repair this passenger's reservation as there could be a number of factors as to the cause of a passenger's booking data to become corrupted on the network.
Whenever I board flights, after the gate CSA scans my boarding pass, I usually listen for the high-pitch barcode beep followed by the low-pitch "ding" that validates the reservation with my name showing on the small screen on the scanner. Not sure if or how this happens when two gate CSA's scan tickets, another situation that I have not yet experienced.
If I had to guess, I would hypothesize that an IT technician needed to be dispatched to the gate to diagnose the cause of the reservation invalidation, repair and "rebook" the passenger's reservation data with the assistance of Southwest's IT department. Hence, a possible reason of why the plane was held. Since I wasn't there, I could be dead wrong on my theory but this is my educated guess.
Either way, I would follow up with Southwest Customer Service to see if this extended delay qualifies for a Luv Voucher for your trip as this appears to be an airline issue.
