Travelers wait in line for Southwest Airlines luggage services to recover their luggage after major service interruptions at Midway International Airport on Dec. 27, 2022. (E. Jason Wambsgans / Chicago Tribune)
The airline with the ticker LUV, now a far cry from its early customers-first days under co-founder Herb Kelleher, ruined countless holiday reunions over the past week. Southwest Airlines marooned not just passengers but also its own crews and landed tens of thousands of its customers in a Sisyphean holiday-week bog from which there seemed to be no escape to anywhere but the filthy bathroom or the knee-deep bar.
Canceled flights were rescheduled to other canceled flights. Pilots deadheaded to nowhere. Stressed-out travelers searched for overpriced planes, trains and automobiles. Even the airline's shareholders got burned as the reputation-searing meltdown caused the company's stock to fall, the market having deduced Southwest was about to lose much of its pricing power and brand affection.
Chicago was at the epicenter of this mess. Unless you're going to Mexico or Canada or a couple of minor Allegiant frontiers, you're almost certainly flying Southwest out of Midway, whose luggage-strewn floors looked more like a refugee camp this week. Allowing one massive airline to so monopolistically dominate a publicly owned airport, designed to serve the people of northern Illinois, looked like utter folly. No wonder local politicians started making statements.
Sure, there was a very bad storm. But any frequent flyer knows that airlines love to trot out the liability-shielding word "weather" when a more honest reason for a delay is a chronic staff shortage, as was clearly the case in Denver for Southwest; no backup plans; or, in this instance, problems with an archaic, off-the-shelf phone and crew-scheduling system that buckled under pressure even as every other airline quickly got back to normal.
Read more of the Chicago Tribune commentary here.
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