southwestward

I've been reading of the meltdown of travel on Southwest Airlines, with a thought of "I could have been in that, if I ever flew over the Christmas holidays, which I never do precisely because of things like this." But I do fly Southwest, which I've always thought of as the friendly airline, and which has given me some outstanding customer service in the past.

But on the other hand, Southwest is the airline which produced a giant hiccup in changing planes on our trip to Albuquerque last summer which got us in three hours late - not truly awful but irritating enough, and all because we took a connecting instead of direct flight because hey, it was Southwest, the friendly airline. And certainly their treatment of the passengers in regard to the delay was not unfriendly. They were also very courteous in rescheduling me when my attempt to fly to Chicago in February was socked out by a snowstorm.

Most of the articles are saying that the problem lay with the inability of Southwest's outdated computer system to handle the cancellations and reschedules attendant on the snowstorm, where other airlines could. And I should have realized they had problems of this kind. Several years ago now I headed to the San Jose airport to pick up my friend L. coming in on the one-hour flight from Burbank, having checked the Southwest website that the flight was on its way. And when I got to SJC, the system said that the flight had arrived. But just then I got a phone call. It was L. The flight had been delayed and hadn't left Burbank yet. This led to an interesting conversation with an agent who confessed that they have to call operations to find out where any Southwest plane is; the computer system is quite unreliable.

Then there's this article, the heartwarming - in the circumstances - stories of people waiting futilely in line at the airport who realize they're all going to the same city so they say the heck with it, they'll get a car and carpool there, sharing the expense and the driving: Austin to Birmingham (760 miles), Kansas City to Tampa (1250 miles), Detroit to Orlando (1150 miles).

This reminds me of my friends from western Massachusetts who found themselves in the Chicago area on 9/11. (I'd been there myself, but I flew home the day before.) Rather than wait for the flights to resume, they took their rental car and drove home (900 miles). This proved so relaxing a job that they've done it voluntarily since then. It wasn't only for that reason that we eschewed flying on our recent trip to the Seattle area (860 miles) but that certainly helped.

Other articles are warning us that this was the fault of the corporate system, not of the customer service agents. True, and I absolutely wouldn't blame the agents for the system's fault. But attitude and helpfulness are not dictated by the system. The agents who castigate you for wanting to cut in line when you're merely asking how long it will take, the ones who take it personally when you try to explain you know it's the system's fault, these are the doing of the agents, not the system, and the absence of such things from good customer service is conspicuous, no matter how fouled up the problem at hand is.