Southwest Airlines canceled hundreds of flights and delayed thousands more over the Christmas holiday weekend as bad weather grounded flights, but rebounded quickly.
The service disruptions were a marked improvement from last year’s holiday period, when the carrier canceled some 17,000 flights, landing the airline with a $140 million fine from the Department of Transportation.
Southwest promised the fiasco would never happen again, investing over $1 billion in updating legacy systems and revamping its customer experience, making the weekend’s troubles all the more frustrating for those affected.
“While it's surely little consolation to passengers who saw their travel plans disrupted, Southwest actually did a good job during the holidays, given the weather conditions,” David Slotnick, a senior aviation business reporter for The Points Guy, told CX Dive in an email.
On Dec. 23 and Dec. 24, the airline canceled 426 flights and delayed nearly 2,690, according to FlightAware, a flight-tracking website. Another 2% of flights were canceled, and 1 in 5 were delayed on Christmas Day.
But by the afternoon of Dec. 26, the airline had largely managed to get its operations under control, with few cancelations in the days since, according to Slotnick.
Southwest attributed the holiday delays and cancelations to foggy weather in Chicago, which grounded flights and prevented others from landing, while some passengers told a local CBS station that the airline was understaffed.
“There was potential for a real crisis here,” Slotnick said. “However, the airline kept the impact to a few hundred canceled flights.”
The rapid rebound suggests the remediation efforts were a success, Slotnick said.
CX Dive reached out to Southwest but did not receive comment by the time of publication.
In an interview with CX Dive prior to the holidays, Chief Customer Officer Tony Roach said the airline had investigated what went wrong in 2022 and put a plan in place to prevent it from happening again.
The airline had seen its trust scores rebound in 2023, which Roach attributed to Southwest’s transparency, demonstrated service and investment in end-to-end customer experiences.
