Southwest Airlines Community

We were traveling to San Diego for my grandmother-in-laws 90th birthday. We bought the tickets way in advance and the flight was scheduled for the morning of 8/19. We were really nervous when we heard about hurricane Hillary but were hopeful since the storm was downgraded to a tropical storm once it hit land down in Mexico and was not supposed to hit SoCal until the night of 8/20 into the next morning. No cancellations or delays that morning. We got to the gate and checked the travel advisories and San Diego was not listed until the next day. The plane arrived on-time and was deboarding. Just before we were supposed to start our boarding process, the gate agent announced they cancelled the flight "due to weather." I assumed it was due to Hillary and waited (as asked by the gate agent) to get automatically rebooked. However, as we were waiting, the agent made another announcement that all of our bags would still be flown to San Diego?? The flight still took off on time taking all of our bags to San Diego even though there was a "weather cancellation?" Southwests cancellation policy states that the bags will be returned to you in case of a weather-related cancellation. No one could explain why our bags went but we could not. We then received notice that our flights were rebooked to late Monday night, two days later. Obviously, that didn't work for anyone on my flight. So, everyone got in line to try to re-book with the gate agent. We were pretty quick to get in line and were in the front 1/4 of the line but it still took over an hour to speak to the agent. As we waited, I was looking for other possible flights. Unfortunately, we needed three seats which is difficult to find last minute but found multiple flights still going to the SoCal area. Long Beach, Burbank and Ontario all had flights (although not all had three seats). If our flight was cancelled due to weather, wouldn't all flights to the area be cancelled as well? So, we re-booked to go to Burbank (the closest city we could find) and planned to rent a car and drive the three hours to San Diego. The flight had a connecting flight in Albuquerque. As we waited, we got a notification that the flight to Albuquerque was delayed and then delayed again to where it would be impossible to make our connecting flight. Albuquerque had no other options at that time either. The line to speak with the gate agent was still extremely long so we started looking for other options. There was a flight to Long Beach the next morning, but we would miss the birthday party (the reason for our trip) and the chances of another weather cancellation were even higher as Hillary was supposed to hit that evening. We then looked at other airlines and found that American Airlines still had several flights going to San Diego that same day. Unfortunately, booking a flight that same day was waaaaay more expensive. We bit the bullet, cancelled our Southwest flight and booked with American. We got to American and there were no cancellations or delays. The pilot came over the intercom before we took off and told us the weather in San Diego was really nice. Maybe a light rain. Our flight had no issues or turbulence. We arrived in San Diego, and it was beautiful. No rain yet. We found our bags at the Southwest terminal (except for our car seat which had been transferred to Burbank but that is another story and I'm satisfied with how Southwest handled it). Unfortunately, we still missed the birthday party due to all the delays with Southwest.   I apologize this was so long. But I'm still really mad that Southwest cancelled our flight under the pretense of weather when that was clearly not true. They didn't follow their own protocols for a weather cancellation. The flight arrived and left on time, but we were not allowed to be on it. They were not able to provide us any kind of suitable alternative and we were forced to spend a lot of extra money booking through another airline where we would not have lost the money had we just booked with them in the first place. I emailed them and received a generic response with the offer to refund our one-way flight (which they should have already done.) I feel like they should pay for the extra we had to spend to book a same-day flight. Am I being unreasonable and is that a legitimate demand? ... View more