After more than 15,000 flights were canceled over the Christmas holidays, leaving thousands of travelers stranded, Southwest Airlines says it’s finally catching up.
The airline appears to be back on track on Friday, with just 41 cancellations after at least 2,362 cancellations on Thursday.
In an exclusive interview with “Good Morning America,” company CEO Bob Jordan said his airline “is off to a great start.”
“I’m looking at the stats and we’ve launched the East Coast and have a great operation going. That’s our full program, over 3,900 flights,” Jordan said. “I’m very confident that we’re going to have a very tight operation today.”
the trip mess began a few days before Christmas, as wintry weather hit parts of the United States, thousands of passengers were stranded and some even missed their trip altogether.
Southwest said it is committed to reimbursing its customers for their canceled flights, as well as other travel-related expenses such as hotels, rental cars and even plane tickets booked through other airlines. .
Other costs will be handled on a case-by-case basis, executives said.
“Our desire is to go above and beyond. We always take care of our customers, that’s our 51-year history here at Southwest Airlines,” Jordan said. We will look into and take care of things like car rental, hotel rooms, meals, rebooking customers on other airlines, so that will all be part of what we cover here as we reimburse our customers and let’s solve this problem.”
Refunds are currently underway, but officials admitted clearing the backlog “would take weeks”.
Department of Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg called on Southwest to process refunds in a timely manner, saying his agency would “ensure” the airline meets its refund obligations and could “penalize” the carrier “if it does not respect what is asked of him”. take care of the passengers.
“By law, Southwest must provide prompt refunds when a carrier cancels a passenger’s flight or makes a material change to the flight for any reason, unless the passenger agrees to a new reservation,” Buttigieg said in a letter to Southwest earlier this week. “This means Southwest must refund within seven business days if a passenger paid by credit card, and within 20 days if a passenger paid by cash, check or other means.”
The winter storm impacted Southwest far more than its competitors, and Jordan said Southwest “had impacts beyond the storm.”
“We had record high temperatures that did things like freeze jetways, freeze planes, freeze de-icing fluid. When you try to solve a problem in so many places, it becomes very, very difficult. Airlines rely on the aircraft, passengers and crew to keep moving and when it all comes to a halt in so many places it becomes very, very difficult,” Jordan said. “It was really the extent of the issues that were trying to be resolved, just to move the crews, to move the airline forward.”
Just before the last holiday weekend of the year, Southwest now faces the challenge of regaining customer trust. Jordan said beyond safety, there is “no greater goal” than taking care of customers.
“It’s impacted so many people, so many customers over the holidays. It’s impacted our employees and I’m extremely sorry for that. There’s almost no way to apologize enough because we love our customers, we love our people and have really touched them. We already had a great plan to invest in tools, technology and processes like we always do, but there will be a lot of lessons learned in terms of what we can do to make sure this never happens again.
ABC News’ Sam Sweeney contributed to this report.
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