Southwest Airlines Community

Hey, what kinda crummy voting process is this? I can only vote ONCE? What if I want to click on "vote for BlogSouthwest" every five minutes until the voting time is over? What if I have a problem with a hanging chad? My motto is "Vote early and vote often"...and now, for all you slackers out there, GO VOTE FOR SOUTHWEST'S BLOG IMMEDIATELY!!! The above paid political announcement was brought to you by Friends of External Blog Boy, Brian Lusk, Treasurer and Chief Candy Corn Consultant. Kim 🙂 ... View more

Bill, This is just one MORE example of the reason that Southwest is so appreciated by its Customers! Lots of us deal with firms all the time that are deaf to our comments and complaints, resulting in a growing cynicism among consumers of goods and services. But NOT the Customers of Southwest Airlines! From minor things like honey roasted nuts and power stations to major things like reservations and online check-in, we see over and over a mindset that is based on serving Employees and Customers alike with the very best that is possible. Thank you for ALL that you do to make it easier for us! Kim :) External Blog Boy ... View more

Francisco, So, what do you do during your spare time to put a little excitement into your dull and boring life? LOL Seriously, your posts are a wonderful insight into the REAL life of our military, especially onboard a floating city like the Nimitz. Too many movies and TV shows glamorize military duty and fail to reveal the TRUE sacrifices that so many people like you make for us every day. I appreciate your stories and pictures and e-mails, but even more, I appreciate your service! Saluting his friend on the high seas, Kim 🙂 ... View more

Mary, That is a terrific story! I've known people who shared your reluctance to reveal where they work for just the reason you've given -- the admission was usually followed by a negative story. However, you are quite fortunate to be able to tell people proudly who you work for without fear of some punch in the nose or long explanation about what your employer 'did' to them! Who knows, maybe one day, folks like Leah and I will be able to join you in making the same declaration! I miss STL! :( Kim EBB ... View more

HAPPY BIRTHDAY! What a wonderful way to celebrate such a great "place"! Even though the Blog only exists in the electronic world, it still feels like a place where those of us who share a LUV for Southwest Airlines can get together. Here, friends hang out, share their ups and downs, laugh a bit, cry a bit and make new friends. This incredible forum couldn't exist without the blessing of Colleen, but it couldn't be what it is without the awesome work done by Brian and Shelley and Sunny and Angela and others within the EO, the contributions of Employees like James and Kelli and Carole and bunches more scattered throughout the SWA system, and the affection from outside the SWA system as shown by folks like Leah and most certainly Francisco. Thank you very much to Colleen and EVERYONE at Southwest Airlines for allowing us to all share in being a part of the best blog in the world! Yes, we ARE all NUTS ABOUT SOUTHWEST! With LUV, Kim :) Proud to be 'External Blog Boy' ... View more

Jim, As a defender of my family honor, I must take umbrage at your insulting joke. I demand the right to defend our honor. I'll meet you in the swimming pool at high noon and we'll see who can balance a ball on their nose the longest. Kim 🙂 ... View more

Hey Blog Boy, Do you know if "Interactive Marketing Manager of Business Support is Jill's day job? I have some good advice for her if it is. EBB 🙂 ... View more

Just teasin' ya... EBB 🙂 ... View more

I dunno, Blog Boy, just last week when I tried to order them with dinner at the Mansion on Turtle Creek, they threw me outta the joint... Rejected Blog Boy 😞 ... View more

Carole, Would you do me a favor? When you schedule that flogging, please give me a head's up so I can come watch. I'll supply the candy corn for the cheering section! External Blog Boy 🙂 ... View more

Hey fellow nut-heads, It seems that our Mr. Kanan was holding out on us! He didn't mention that he was in top secret, high-level and crucial negotiations with our favorite airline. But, the nut is out of the shell now, as revealed in the newspaper: http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/bus/industries/airlines/stories/041007dnbussouthwest.1dc3acf.html Feast your eyes and tummies on THAT news, and be prepared to rip open those packages every OTHER year, depending on your preferences! The Nutty Blogger 🙂 ... View more

Well, this may seem nutty of me to derail such a lively discussion about peeps, but, I've got news to reveal that may warm the hearts of many of my fellow Southwest Customers (and make their tummies happy)... http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/bus/industries/airlines/stories/041007dnbussouthwest.1dc3acf.html Now, I wonder how many folks will postpone their 2008 vacations just so they can fly even MORE in 2009 and load up on those sweet morsels? External Blog Boy and Confirmed Nut 🙂 ... View more

Carole, I didn't know that Mr. Grant, the British actor, got a bonus from the use of MedLink. Hmmmmm, wonder if Richard Branson negotiated that for him? LMAO...sorry, I couldn't resist! Kim 🙂 ... View more

Brady, Maybe you should take the advice that our Music Minister at church once gave me. After listening to me sing, he offered the opinion that I should definitely sing tenor. Not thinking that was my normal range, I queried him, "Tenor? Really?" He said, "Yep, ten or twelve miles from here!" Kim :) Carole, What a great post! I'm glad that Blog Boy finally "unlocked" it so we could add comments. For awhile, I thought he was going to just leave you dangling out there at the end of the branch, as empty-handed as Paul looking for his mouse! Your skirt story reminds me of a story that I heard from the Activities Director onboard a cruise ship I was on a few years ago. As you probably know, cruises dock at various ports to allow their pax to take "shore excursions", which often include group tours of local tourist sites. On one such trip, there was a lady who had decided she still could fit into a skirt from several years before. But while trying to step up onto a small tour bus, she found that it was just too tight, so she discreetly reached behind her and partially lowered the zipper, hoping that the crowd waiting in line would obscure what she had done. Another attempt at getting her leg up high enough to step up failed, so she reached back and tugged the zipper down a little bit more. Once again, she tried unsuccessfully to step up to that first bus step, and now flustered, she decided to just unzip it the rest of the way. As soon as she did, she felt some large, strong and masculine hands grab her posterior and lift her up to the first step. Horribly insulted, she turned and slapped the man behind her, demanding, "How dare you touch me? I don't even know you!" The man replied, "Yeah, I felt the same way every time you kept reaching back and lowering my zipper." LOL External Blog Boy 🙂 ... View more

Shelley, What a wonderful posting to keep us mindful of the sacrifices being made every day by men and women from this country who are serving overseas! How often do we all get up each morning and go about our normal daily routine without giving thought to our troops? We complain about rush hour traffic or long lines at the grocery store, but these outstanding Americans in uniform are facing people who want to kill them every moment of every day. We get to go to the comfort of our homes and turn on our color TVs without thanking the folks who won that freedom for us and who keep winning it on a daily basis. Your post is also a wonderful reminder of just why the ticker symbol for Southwest is LUV. Our favorite airline is more than just a group of people who move passengers from point A to point B; it is a collection of people who care deeply about others and whose hearts are as big as the one painted on the side of the Heroes of the Heart 737! At the end of the day, the low fares, the great Employees, the timely service and the wonderful peanuts all pale in comparison to the fact that you also spread the Southwest-style of LUV to those who need an extra share of it! The biggest profit that is earned at the end of the year is not a monetary one -- it is the reward of knowing that your servant hearts have reached out and given something of yourselves. Bravo and Brava for ALL of the Employees at Southwest! Kim External Blog Boy 🙂 ... View more

Hey Brian, USS Blog Boy e-mailed me and said that his sister ate all of his candy corn before he could get it onboard. Do you think that the Culture Chicks could load up a SW 737 with loads of candy corn and peanuts and land it on the Nimitz deck as a "special delivery"? LOL External Blog Boy 🙂 ... View more

Matt, Congratulations on your new assignment! My wife has family in ABQ and I have great memories of visits to your new home. Last fall, I spent one afternoon enjoying the Sandia Peak Tram experience during a break in a convention, and wandering through some of the tourist shops in Old Town is a must! If you're a Mexican food fan, try Los Cuates on Lomas. However, as much as I'm happy for your transfer, I am from THIS side of the Red River, and along with a healthy dose of Southwest Canyon Blue in my system, I do have burnt-orange blood. So, as far as I'm concerned, you don't need to worry about any trips back to Norman, since the Sooners ain't gonna win the National Championship! LOL Hook 'em Horns, Kim 🙂 ... View more

J. D., I think you are being unreasonable. The seasoned traveler knows to expect the potential for delays and cancelled flights. It is necessary to pack based on the different contigencies that you might encounter. That is the reason why I NEED all of the overhead bin space I can get. For a three-day trip, I typically take six suitcases. I bring seven days' worth of clothes based on what the weather is supposed to be (two outfits per day plus a spare), seven days' worth of clothes for the opposite weather conditions (in case something changes radically while on the trip), two computers (in case one develops a problem), a color TV set (in case the one in the hotel doesn't work, or I have to spend the night in an airport lobby), a DVD player and several movies (in case I can't get a good TV signal somewhere), a set of bed sheets, blanket and pillow (for the same reasons as the TV), five different meals already packed in separate containers (in case of a long layover to avoid buying expensive airport food), six books to read (one set of three for the plane trips and three extra for layovers or in case of power failure at the hotel preventing me from watching my TV set) and one spare suitcase to bring back souvenirs and knick-knacks from the tourist trap stores I'm bound to visit. You think I could possibly get all of that UNDER the seat in front of me???? Sheesh, Kim, the well-prepared traveler 🙂 ... View more

Gordon, I remember "back in the day" when I'd walk up to a counter at Love Field and buy a ticket with cash. I'd hand a $20 bill to a nice lady standing at an old-fashioned tan colored cash register with push-button keys (no electronics), and she'd ring up the sale. In return, I'd get a dollar back plus a short cash register tape that served as my ticket. Then, if I had a suitcase to check, they'd put a little heart-shaped string tag on my bag. For years, I'd tear off enough of the tag upon arrival to prevent future confusion, but leave enough of the string end of the colored paper to serve as a "fringe of distinction", adorning my suitcase handle with dozens of indicators that showed what a frequent and loyal Customer I was. Much like a passport full of stamped imprints of someone's journeys, my "fringed" handle always drew an appreciative comment from the ticket counter folks at Southwest locations around Texas who could tell I was a "regular". (I thought we had really entered the electronic age when I started using the "Quicket" machines with the push buttons for day-time or evening flights and the individual city destinations that the Customer could use themselves!!) Those ticketing and bag marking procedures were amazingly unique and simple indicators of how much of a "rebel" our hometown airline was! Although the ticketing procedure has changed just a little bit (thanks to our ex-VP who invented the Internet), and we now have long adhesive strips of computer generated baggage information, the uniqueness, the simplicity and the radically different Culture remain a vital and wonderful part of the airline that we LUV! Kim 🙂 ... View more

Francisco, Stay safe and well, buddy. You know that you have lots of new friends in your extended Southwest family who are praying for you and keeping you in their thoughts. We'll be anxious to hear from you whenever possible and even more anxious to hear of your safe return. Godspeed where the awesome USS Nimitz takes you! Best wishes always, Kim P. S. Each time you eat one of those candy corns, think about us! 🙂 ... View more

Joe, I believe the interagency connection between the U. S. Navy and the IRS is less thorough than you've suggested. Besides, those taxes aren't past due...YET. Beware the Ides of April, External Blog Boy 🙂 ... View more

Francisco, I've re-sent the first two e-mails and a new one after confirming that I had your e-mail address correct. Maybe check your "spam" folder to see if my incoming ones were diverted there perhaps. Look for an address from an AOL account that begins with "TX". It could be that the government e-mail servers had to censor one of them...it was a picture of Shelley when she fell asleep and was using her neighbor's shoulder as a pillow. Munching my candy corn, Kim 🙂 ... View more

Mr. Wexler, As a stockholder and one of the "owners" of Southwest Airlines, please let me offer you my apologies for the problems you experienced leaving Reno a few weeks ago. As a long-time Customer of Southwest Airlines, please let me empathize with you, because I have also encountered delays on Southwest flights. However, I would like to politely beg to differ with your assessment of Southwest Airlines. I believe that it is entirely possible for any member of the "service industry" to have a logistical problem without then being branded as "mediocre". Whether you are looking at airlines, hotels, rental car agencies, restaurants, taxi companies or any of the other myriad participants in the efforts to accomodate large numbers of people with many different demands, the travel industry is getting much more complex and the task is becoming more difficult by the day. Unfortunately, there are times when human error or unavoidable outside influences can affect a customer of any part of the travel business. That is always regrettable and is something that most companies strive to prevent. In my opinion, Southwest Airlines does a MUCH BETTER job at moving people from point A to point B than any other airline. They are consistently on-time with very competitive fares and have utstanding Employees with terrific attitudes. Does that mean that they are perfect? No, absolutely not. But I believe that they are FAR from mediocre and in fact, at the head of the pack. Southwest is not unique to the world of 'overbooking'. It happens in the airline industry, the hotel industry and the rental car industry for certain. The economic reality is that most companies must overbook to a degree or they will face the problem of unsold product. For an airline, an empty seat that flies from Reno to LAX is lost revenue that can never be recaptured. At a hotel, a room not slept in one night represents income that is forever gone, since like an airline seat, it exists only in a particular point in time. Historical data tells most companies what their "no-show" ratios are, and they try to book their reservations accordingly. If the particular flight you mentioned, from Reno to LAX at 2:15 pm on a Saturday afternoon, for example, has consistently had five empty seats when it departs, despite having been booked "full", then at some point, to try to put a paying passenger in those seats, Southwest might use a percentage and decide that they will 'overbook' by 3 seats to increase the odds that more of those seats will be used (and paid for). A hotel location will use a formula as well to try to be sure that even though various people have reserved all of their rooms on a given day, when that night arrives, there are actually people occupying all of them. These techniques are very common, but all result from customers who make reservations and then fail to cancel them, or who for some reason, just don't show up to 'consume' the product they've reserved. Southwest actually is able to REDUCE this occurence through their liberal policies allowing people to change reservations. Many airlines drastically penalize their customers with fees and charges, but Southwest WANTS to have their reservations as accurate as possible and so they encourage their Customers to often change without penalty. As a customer of a member of the service/travel industry, we sometimes run into a problem because of overbooking, and that is not enjoyable from our perspective. However, as a stockholder, I want Southwest to do everything reasonable that they can to maximize profits while minimizing passenger incovenience. As a passenger, I want to be sure that "my" seat is there as I booked it. Sometimes those two wishes may be in conflict with each other, and that is why I always endeavor to "claim" my product as soon as I possibly can. Whether that means showing up as far ahead of departure time as I can, or checking into a hotel in the afternoon, I work to reduce the chance that I will be left holding an empty bag. I've seen people come rushing up to an airport with intensely insufficient time before their flights, and I've seen people checking into a hotel at midnight. While there can be occasional circumstances that put you into these situations, that will greatly increase your odds of being 'bumped'. When that happens, though, I've seen Southwest also be much more liberal than other airlines in terms of the compensation offered for bumped passengers. The generous distribution of flight vouchers, free tickets and sincere regrets is very standard on Southwest, whereas I've seen other airlines just suggest that the displaced passenger call another airline and see if they can change to the competition. All in all, even though issues can occur to the Customers of Southwest Airlines, I believe the likelihood is much lower, and that even if they do occur, the passenger will be better treated by Southwest. I think what your fellow passenger said, "That this was not Southwest like" is very true, and any company or group of employees can have a bad day. What IS Southwest-like is to be very Customer-oriented and to go out of their way to do everything possible to see to it that you get where you wanted to go as close to your desired schedule as they can. Please don't give up on the best airline just because of a 45-minute or so delay or even a surly flight attendant. I always try to think of my own work experience and ask myself if I've ever been less than very friendly to people I've dealt with or ever let them down in terms of missed ship dates or undesired back orders before being too critical of how someone else treats me when I'm the customer. Please come back and give the AWESOME Southwest Employees the chance to restore your faith in them and their company! Kim ... View more

Dear Blog Boy, Ya know, bud, it isn't that I doubt what you've said or posted, but.... This post went up almost two weeks ago, and as of today, I have yet to see any reply from someone named Fred Taylor. Are you sure you didn't make him up, or that you created a pseudonym for yourself to use when interviewed by the NYTimes? This seems like the old Clark Kent/Superman problem. Even though Lois and Jimmy's bulbs were too low-wattage to figure it out, I've noticed that YOU are all over this blog, but no Fred Taylor. I think I'll contact Oliver Stone; he might want to check out this conspiracy and then make a movie about it. Sherlock Blog Boy ... View more

Hey USS Blog Boy, Have you gotten any of my e-mails that should have been waiting for your return to the Nimitz? External Blog Boy ... View more

Yeah, Herb explained to me how to get this thing off. He said, "Righty tighty, lefty loosey..." Kim 🙂 ... View more

Gordon, Now you've got me curious...wonder what James Malone would look like in hot pants and go-go boots?? LOL Kim 🙂 ... View more

Carole, What a great blog piece! Your literary efforts should go a long way towards counteracting the long-held, but very incorrect belief that flight attendants are just pretty girls or handsome boys who are there to hand out drinks. Quite obviously, all FAs, especially including Southwest's, are highly trained professionals who fortunately do not have to use the full range of their skills too often. I personally had a medical situation once that could have been much more serious than it turned out. As you probably know, one of the great dangers after an organ transplant is the risk that tissue rejection will take place and the host body will 'reject' the new organ. Unwisely flying too soon after a recent operation, I experienced symptoms that had every appearance of severe and possibly fatal organ rejection. The highly intuitive FA immediately recognized what was happening to me and quickly brought me an entire can of Coca-Cola. She chastised me for taking an airplane trip right after my brain transplant and instructed me to go home, get in bed and refrain from blogging for a few days. Thanks to her, a bad situation was avoided and my transplanted organ is working just fine once again just fine once again just fine once again. Kim 🙂 ... View more

Dear Darth, Nah, we're also good at killing time, stretching the truth and shoveling errr, "stuff"! EBB 🙂 ... View more

Laurie, I can't speak for everyone, but one of the reasons that I used to ask was that I had a BlackBerry, and with Internet access to websites like FlightAware, I could "see" where the flight was and get very accurate information about its arrival. This is not meant as a 'knock' against the infomation supplied by the Gate Agent, but sometimes your info is not totally current. One time, I was waiting at a gate to depart El Paso, and the Gate Agent had updated us with some sketchy information about a delay, but she wasn't sure what was going on and wasn't positive about the arrival time of the inbound flight. I pulled up FlightAware and punched in the flight number for the plane that was heading toward El Paso. Looking at a visual of the flight path, I saw that the plane had reached a point roughly halfway between Midland (MAF) and El Paso (ELP) before looping back and that it had now landed at MAF. I refreshed the screen to be sure, and it indicated that the plane had landed at MAF about five minutes before. I went up to the Gate Agent and showed her the display on my CrackBerry and said, "I think our plane has diverted back to Midland for some reason." She and her supervisor both looked at my little screen in disbelief. They said they would check on it, and while I stood there, they called someone else in the airport. As it turns out, ELP had been 'shut down' due to an aircraft incident on the only operating runway, and all inbound flights were sent elsewhere and those on the ground weren't leaving. This is not a criticism of the information system at all, either the one at ELP or the internal SWA one, but in this case, the information available to me via the Internet was much more current than what the Gate Agents were being told or were able to pass on to the waiting passengers. Another, even more technical and complicated reason some folks may ask -- maybe they're just bored and curious! :) Kim, rarely bored but often curious... ... View more