Southwest vows to ‘do better’
Surge of travelers has carrier struggling
Dan Csizmadia, of Indiana, is a big fan of Southwest Airlines. A frequent flyer, Csizmadia is on the airline’s customer advisory council and owns stock in the company.
Southwest is testing the engineer’s allegiance this summer. The latest issue: an unexplained series of delays on an early morning flight from Las Vegas to Chicago this month after a Bruno Mars concert.
“There’s something off,” said Csizmadia, owner of Advance Process Solutions. “They’re not interested in customer service.”
Southwest executives conceded Thursday that something is indeed off. They said the airline’s operations have struggled this summer as travel has roared back from pandemic lows, and said making the airline reliable again is their top priority.
Southwest’s on-time performance in June was just 62.4%, and stood at 67% so far in July, the company said. In the same months in summer 2019, when crowds were bigger, Southwest’s ontime performance was 75.1% in June and 80.3% in July, respectively.
“We need to and we will do better than that moving forward,” Southwest Chief Operating Officer Mike Van de Ven said during the airline’s quarterly earnings conference call.
The U.S. Department of Transportation rankings for June and July flights won’t be out until later this summer, but Southwest said it is in the middle of the pack so far in July. American Airlines had a bad June, too, but the airline cut flights in the first half of July to address the issue and says its operation is back on track.
The issues go beyond Southwest’s flight woes in June, first from several weather and technology glitches, and then from more bad weather and what the flight attendants union said was a high number of sick calls.
Southwest executives said it is not a matter of staffing shortages, saying they were staffed appropriately when the summer began. They said they are seeing only pockets of hiring issues, mainly for ground service workers, including baggage handlers.
The airline said it’s the sudden surge of travel that arrived as it was “still ramping up the operation,” an operation without enough wiggle room.
Southwest operated 650 more daily round-trip flights in June than it did in March, a 25% increase, Van de Ven said. The number of passengers and the bags they are checking nearly doubled, he said. Flights departing Southwest’s major cities are leaving 90% full.
Southwest said it built in extra time between flights, called turn times, to prepare for the expected post-vaccination travel blitz, but it wasn’t enough. Also hurting: The airline is smaller than it was in summer 2019 – with 16% fewer flights – so when bad weather and other flight issues arise, it has fewer flights available for passenger rebooking.
The increased delays and cancellations mean passengers are stuck for longer than normal, so Southwest, which generally eschews late-night flying, has been operating longer hours.
To address the situation, Van de Ven said Southwest in the short term is offering employees incentives to work on scheduled days off or is adding workers in several of its large cities.
“It was a bit messy as we throttled down our activity (last year), and it doesn’t surprise me that it’s a bit messy as we’re accelerating it,” Van de Ven said.
He said the situation should continue to improve as summer storms “disappear” and planes are less full as summer vacation season ends.
“I think we’ll be better in August than we were in July. And hopefully, here by the end of the third quarter and the fourth quarter, we’ll be back to where we wanted to be.”
Southwest CEO Gary Kelly said, “It’s not obviously the customer service that we want to offer our customers. But I think the worst, clearly the worst of it, is behind us in June.”