Southwest Airlines Community

@Ronshan wrote: Thanks for allowing me to ask for a hotel room for the night, the idea which was properly squashed by your wonderful supervisory employee who stated " not for a weather event" and dismissed me and my audacity for even considering the possibility. Thank you so much for forcing me to pay the additional cost of a customer focused airline for my future travels. Getting stuck at an airport due to a weather event is frustrating, I agree. It's happened to me a few times. However, there's not a single U.S. airline with a policy to provide passengers a hotel room for a cancellation due to a weather event. I imagine that there are quite a few American, United, and Delta passengers who slept at the airport last night also. You honestly won't find a more customer-focused airline than Southwest. ... View more

@Ronshan wrote: Dear SW, Who is the genius that cancels flights based upon a weather forecast for 9-10 hours later? Oh, thunderstorms are forcast for any given city; scattered rain and thunderstorms with possible lightning so let's cancel the flights. Isn't that every destination all summer long? Come on! My notification that my flight was cancelled was at 10:30 AM in NAS, flights to BWI were cancelled that landed at 6:45 PM. Really? Cancelled? Why? Forcasted bad weather? You MUST be joking! What newly educated genius made this call? You should hire several more of these morons so that when your company goes under, you'll have someone to blame. Forecasted storms in the area 9-10 hours later? Better cancel the flights. We don't want to have our pilots and ground crews make any decisions that could jeopardize our bottom line. We'll cancel and call it a weather event so no customer compensation will be necessary.   Sorry to hear about your travel troubles. I'm sure it was pretty maddening. i've had travel days like that, and they are absolutely no fun.   That being said, check the national news this morning about weather on the east coast. A dam in Va may collapse due to the excessive amount of rainfall. So Southwest was likely correct when it cancelled flights due to the expected bad weather.   All airlines opeate in a way that disruptions are managed in a way to minimize total disruption to the system. Planes and crew have to be properly positioned so that f uture flights are not cancelled. That sometimes means that it is better to cancel a flight than to have the flight depart and then divert - putting both the plane and the crew in the wrong place thus jeopardizing future flights. That also puts passengers in the wrong airport struggling even more to get to their final destinations.   No airline cancels flights on a day like yeterday to save money. They do so to try to minimize total disruption to the arline and it's passengers.  ... View more