Ah, the holidays, a time for rest, relaxation, and travel with family and friends, or if you were someone who flew on Southwest Airlines this past holiday, you probably did none of those things. During the course of the Christmas holiday, Southwest Airlines canceled 16,000 flights, smashing records in all of the wrong ways, leaving people stranded during one of the busiest travel times of the year. So how did one of the most trusted and reliable airlines find itself being investigated by every federal committee and news source that can get its hands on them?
In order to answer this question, it needs to be understood what was going on at the time. The week prior to Christmas, the U.S. saw one of the biggest winter storms on recent record with record-low temperatures even as far south as the Texas-Mexico border. While this would be a great reason that a flight would be canceled or delayed, it wasn’t. In fact, during the first day of the winter storm, American Airlines canceled just two flights. The question remains of how Southwest had to cancel an average of 2500 flights a day over a 5-day span despite many other carriers having only a few cancelations and delays.
While numerous issues happened during this time, it can ultimately be boiled down to two things; lack of sufficient IT infrastructure and the use of a “point to point” routing model. The irony in this situation though is that both of these things were what kept Southwest so cheap and efficient. So let’s look at each closer to see the impact they had on the situation as a whole.
Southwest’s IT infrastructure has never been something to grin about. With numerous system-wide crashes and malfunctions over the last 10 years, it’s clear that the adoption of the newest technologies to support the needs of employees and customers alike has not been Southwest’s biggest priority. However, with an ever-growing demand for budget flights, it simply has not been able to support the airline when there are stresses on the system like a winter storm. Yet despite this technology blunder by the company, it wasn’t what ultimately brought them thousands of cancelations per day.
What did that, was none other than their prized route model otherwise known as the “point to point” routing system. For context, most traditional airlines use a “spoke and hub” model which entails a flight going from the “hub” city to the “spoke” city and then back to the hub. This is done by American at DFW, United at IAH, and Delta at ATL. Southwest, however, does not do this, and flights can originate from anywhere and go anywhere which is efficient but only to a certain extent and only when flights are not delayed or canceled. When you have a winter storm that cancels a flight, now that flight crew can’t get to their next flight which cancels the next, thus creating a massive domino effect of cancelations. Had this happened in a “hub and spoke” model it would be no issue because they constantly have extra flight crews and resources at their disposal. Ultimately it was this that halted the airline for almost a week, reducing it to a third of its capacity at one point.
So how do they fix it? Southwest needs to install a contingency plan for when stress is put onto their routing model, whether that be having extra flight crews or even creating flights to and from major airports which might have more resources than others. It is also time for a dramatic system revision because time and time again the IT issues just shouldn’t be happening in a world of such advanced computing, analytics, and planning.
Bottom line. Southwest is going to be okay. They are one of the largest and most successful airlines ever, operating on a system of high efficiency and efficacy. I myself have flown on Southwest close to 100 times in my life and I have only ever had a single major delay, results that I have not seen from other airlines. The question will be; how do they bounce back and fix their systems without compromising their values and services as an airline?
