Posted: Fri Jan 03, 2014 10:55 am
Let this serve as a warning to all. Do NOT book anything going through Midway!
Here's how the trip goes:
Wife's best friend lives in Seattle. I had points and a couple of vouchers. One of the few silver linings to the huge mess is that atleast I'm not out any airfare money.
So we get to the airport at about 2pm for a 4pm flight. Everything is good no delays. I noticed on the weather channel it was snowing in Chicago which is where we were going to connect to Seattle thru.
We get on the plane. We get off the plane 20 minutes later, they weren't even done boarding. We waited an hour. While doing so I was checking the status of our connecting flight. I was literally in line cancelling my car rental which i ended up not cancelling at that point when they told me I would be able to make it to Seattle and not to worry about it. The gate agens stated it was a weather delay across the whole airline with flights going into MDW so the plane from RDU (that we were getting on toe fly to SEA) was delayed the same amount of time we were and that it would be a wash. We get on the tarmac, via flight tracker software I see the RDU flight is on the Tarmac and we wait. We wait about 2 hours and they tell us were turning around to go back to the gate. Katy and I decided to cancel once we got back. Only we never got back, they pulled a U-turn and took off. I look at RDU, still on the ground. We land in MDW. RDU has just taken off. Ok, multi hour delay during an ungodly hour, could be worse right?
We sit on the tarmac at MDW and wait, and wait, about another hour and a half to 2 hours and eventually get a gate. the fight from RDU had landed and was on the tarmac for about half an hour when we get off our plane. we knew there was a back log of gates to unload but everything pointed to a 3-5 hour delay getting to seattle, not that we have much choice. this is about 10pm. we wait and wait. RDU never finds a gate. They were on the tarmac. Eventually cancellations pour in after we kept getting multiple updates extending our delay by a half an hour each time (At least according to websites as the airport take off/departure boards and staff were very quiet and displayed no changes even though anyone that could tell time knew there were going to be delays that were pretty serious) Planes were boarding and sitting at the gate doing nothing for an hour or so then taking off. Ok, so goings are slow right? Well by 1am or so the back log of flights coming in was down to 6. Guess who was still on the tarmac? The plane we needed to get on from RDU. Ok, itll just be a while, try to get some sleep maybe. during this time flights to memphis, louisville, and charlotte made it out flying so I dont think it was a weather issue for chicago and the radars between MDW and the west coast all looked pretty tame.
then the announcements start happening, flights to PHX, SLC, and LAX all went down first before ours with some VERY po'd travelers in their wake. (Some of those people had been at MDW for more than 24 hours too) The problem is compounded by these issues:
-every plane out of MDW is booked slap full until Monday or so.
-"your luggage will be on the next flight even if you aren't"
and finally
-"we aren't pulling any bags tonight" and "we just don't have enough people right now"
So here's what i can gather. Southwest's Chicago people had some major functional disconnects in the way of "what we are telling people" vs "what is going to happen and what we are planning on happening"
-amongst the things Southwest employees told me, gate agents and baggage agents mostly was that about half the people who were supposed to come in for the evening shift actually showed up.
I guess the other half either didn't want to drive/take mass transit in the cold and snow or simply assumed a bunch of the flights were going to be cancelled and that they weren't needed and cancelled their shifts. Meanwhile everyone gets into to the terminal and flights are leaving on plenty of other airlines including SW.
-the other thing that was told to us by baggage agents first was "we'll pull your bags, get in this line"
this is followed up by a 40 minute line wait (at around 130-230 am) and a lady coming out and saying "we're not pulling anyones bags tonight, your baggage will continue to its destination" this is great if your heading home. not so much if youre on the out bound portion of your trip. I get on the phone and get my luggage turned around once it reaches Seattle at least. It will be in Atlanta some day.
They keep telling us that there arent enough "gates" but whenever people are getting off the plane off loads relatively quickly. I know baggage takes some time but I'm pretty sure I, by myself, could get all of the bags off a plane in an hour or so. Probably less if I had access to the airlines' equipment. People get on the new empty planes and sit for an hour or so before taking off. We are told this is due to pilots not being allowed to fly due to fatigue (I think thats a good thing and at least they were honest with us) and not having enough stewardesses (which points to my staffing theory).
Finally and this is the best one (from the gate agent at B23): "You'll have to rebook at the airport. The 1800 number's people are hanging up on customers. I've never heard of this happening but the people on the phone are telling people here at MDW that they can only rebook in person at the airport and that there's nothing they can do" I am certain this woman has NO IDEA what she was talking about
Here's the other thing, flights on SW to midway to pretty much ANYWHERE are running at capacity. No one can switch flights if they wanted to and they went on and cancelled flights out of MDW through noon or so Friday to "catch up" which is fine if u live in Chicago and awful if your just stuck there as it simply compounds your trouble. Flights out of MDW on other carriers aren't much better but if you've got the money they've got the time. I didnt have the money
So assuming it was weather, why were the flights allowed to take off and land at MDW only to sit there for hours on end? Their weather people surely have algorithims to decide weather or not a flight should occur. this would include inbound as well as outbound (unsafe landing is just as deadly as unsafe take off)
Assuming it was staffing, why wouldn't you cancel flights coming into MDW since tarmac wait violations are pretty expensive (1.1 million dollars is what united got hit with for an incident at Ohare in July 2012 that left people on the tarmac from between 3 and 4 hours)
So why not cancel going into midway in either case? The federal regulations have fines as high as 27500 per passenger. This would surely be enough to incentivize simply cancelling flights and allowing people to reschedule.
If midway had open gates elsewhere (which they did), why was southwest not using them? I dont know what goes into that but it seems like it'd be in the best interests of passenger safety and goodwill to run skeleton crews to the empty gates and get people off planes even if their bags stay there
My guess is this: Employees called out. They had the gates and planes but not the people. Planes were having to wait longer to be refuelled, de-iced, restocked and so forth. This creates delays on the tarmac. Crews that are being moved to other planes simply can't be moved to other planes as thyere stuck on a runway. because of this planes can't take off. Planes cant take off meaning new planes cant take their spots at the gate resulting in further back ups, which causes those other planes' crews to get even further behind. Compound that with a system wide delay of takeoffs for a couple hours and have all the planes arrive at once and you get an even greater bottleneck....and so it goes in a horrid Katamari of inconvenience and unexpected cost incursions for all parties involved.
As much as I like Southwest I think they dropped the ball pretty hard on this one and I think theyre going to get burnt. That RDU flight spent at LEAST 5 hours on the runway.
By the way, that whole, "dont call the 1800 number" schpiel from a gate agent was really awful advice. EVERY bit of progress I made last night with bags and rebooking was made over the phone rather than with a human. Once our flight was cancelled it took me about an hour and a half to get the luggage reconciled and a flight rebooked. Another 15 minutes and I had a hotel room for Friday and Saturday night.
So what have I learned? First off, NEVER book thru midway. it is a pit of scum forgotten by God and is worse than Miami's airport in terms of dilapidation. They look to be very prone to weather problems. Luckily in the other times I was supposed to go there my flights just got cancelled before we were to end up there or got re-routed thru other cities.
What else? buying travel insurance is a really good idea if you're spending actual money. I wasnt spending actual money for these flights (points and a couple of flight vouchers) so atleast i'm blessed in that I don't have a 1500 dollar hole in my wallet with nothing to show for it. i'm out a car rental and thats it. I had to get some new hotel rooms that i didnt plan on spending money on and pay some cab fare but thats not a huge deal all things considered.
what else? The hard rock in chicago is cheaper than anything near midway. cab fare is about 25 bucks from midway to the hotel. make use of this resource as its a nice room with good views and the staff always has really fantastic customer service. (well atleast this one and the one in Biloxi do)
The airport and Southwest aren't being very forthcoming as far as they delays/cancellations go and are vaguely blaming it on "weather" but it thats the case why was it effecting the out bound flights from an airport which is apparently safe to land in? I imagine that dangerous coming = dangerous going
On a final note, the car rental places that were open and had cars were quoting 1200 dollars for a subcompact. way to price yourselves out of the market guys, Im pretty sure people can get limos to other towns with airports for cheaper than that
Here's an article that gives a pretty good account. Here's another thing, flights are just "cancelled" rather than "rescheduled".....this is going to lead to some people being stuck at midway for a couple of days
http://www.myfoxchicago.com/story/24354 ... an-3-hours
Bright side:
-maybe I get to see the fire station from the movie backdraft?
-its been a learning experience and it was the kind of scenario i used to worry about a lot. this isnt that terrible if you have a couple hundred dollars to throw at it
-I hear theres some good food around. whatever was outside the hard rock smelled absolutely delicious when we got in around 345 am. Like chocolate chip muffins or brownies. I plan on finding that today.
-the view from the 29th floor is nice
-maybe ill go to the sears tower
If I had my bags I'd be heading to one of the local ski/tubing/sledding hills. Oh well. At least the place I am staying tonight has an indoor pool.
First World Problems.....
Here's how the trip goes:
Wife's best friend lives in Seattle. I had points and a couple of vouchers. One of the few silver linings to the huge mess is that atleast I'm not out any airfare money.
So we get to the airport at about 2pm for a 4pm flight. Everything is good no delays. I noticed on the weather channel it was snowing in Chicago which is where we were going to connect to Seattle thru.
We get on the plane. We get off the plane 20 minutes later, they weren't even done boarding. We waited an hour. While doing so I was checking the status of our connecting flight. I was literally in line cancelling my car rental which i ended up not cancelling at that point when they told me I would be able to make it to Seattle and not to worry about it. The gate agens stated it was a weather delay across the whole airline with flights going into MDW so the plane from RDU (that we were getting on toe fly to SEA) was delayed the same amount of time we were and that it would be a wash. We get on the tarmac, via flight tracker software I see the RDU flight is on the Tarmac and we wait. We wait about 2 hours and they tell us were turning around to go back to the gate. Katy and I decided to cancel once we got back. Only we never got back, they pulled a U-turn and took off. I look at RDU, still on the ground. We land in MDW. RDU has just taken off. Ok, multi hour delay during an ungodly hour, could be worse right?
We sit on the tarmac at MDW and wait, and wait, about another hour and a half to 2 hours and eventually get a gate. the fight from RDU had landed and was on the tarmac for about half an hour when we get off our plane. we knew there was a back log of gates to unload but everything pointed to a 3-5 hour delay getting to seattle, not that we have much choice. this is about 10pm. we wait and wait. RDU never finds a gate. They were on the tarmac. Eventually cancellations pour in after we kept getting multiple updates extending our delay by a half an hour each time (At least according to websites as the airport take off/departure boards and staff were very quiet and displayed no changes even though anyone that could tell time knew there were going to be delays that were pretty serious) Planes were boarding and sitting at the gate doing nothing for an hour or so then taking off. Ok, so goings are slow right? Well by 1am or so the back log of flights coming in was down to 6. Guess who was still on the tarmac? The plane we needed to get on from RDU. Ok, itll just be a while, try to get some sleep maybe. during this time flights to memphis, louisville, and charlotte made it out flying so I dont think it was a weather issue for chicago and the radars between MDW and the west coast all looked pretty tame.
then the announcements start happening, flights to PHX, SLC, and LAX all went down first before ours with some VERY po'd travelers in their wake. (Some of those people had been at MDW for more than 24 hours too) The problem is compounded by these issues:
-every plane out of MDW is booked slap full until Monday or so.
-"your luggage will be on the next flight even if you aren't"
and finally
-"we aren't pulling any bags tonight" and "we just don't have enough people right now"
So here's what i can gather. Southwest's Chicago people had some major functional disconnects in the way of "what we are telling people" vs "what is going to happen and what we are planning on happening"
-amongst the things Southwest employees told me, gate agents and baggage agents mostly was that about half the people who were supposed to come in for the evening shift actually showed up.
I guess the other half either didn't want to drive/take mass transit in the cold and snow or simply assumed a bunch of the flights were going to be cancelled and that they weren't needed and cancelled their shifts. Meanwhile everyone gets into to the terminal and flights are leaving on plenty of other airlines including SW.
-the other thing that was told to us by baggage agents first was "we'll pull your bags, get in this line"
this is followed up by a 40 minute line wait (at around 130-230 am) and a lady coming out and saying "we're not pulling anyones bags tonight, your baggage will continue to its destination" this is great if your heading home. not so much if youre on the out bound portion of your trip. I get on the phone and get my luggage turned around once it reaches Seattle at least. It will be in Atlanta some day.
They keep telling us that there arent enough "gates" but whenever people are getting off the plane off loads relatively quickly. I know baggage takes some time but I'm pretty sure I, by myself, could get all of the bags off a plane in an hour or so. Probably less if I had access to the airlines' equipment. People get on the new empty planes and sit for an hour or so before taking off. We are told this is due to pilots not being allowed to fly due to fatigue (I think thats a good thing and at least they were honest with us) and not having enough stewardesses (which points to my staffing theory).
Finally and this is the best one (from the gate agent at B23): "You'll have to rebook at the airport. The 1800 number's people are hanging up on customers. I've never heard of this happening but the people on the phone are telling people here at MDW that they can only rebook in person at the airport and that there's nothing they can do" I am certain this woman has NO IDEA what she was talking about
Here's the other thing, flights on SW to midway to pretty much ANYWHERE are running at capacity. No one can switch flights if they wanted to and they went on and cancelled flights out of MDW through noon or so Friday to "catch up" which is fine if u live in Chicago and awful if your just stuck there as it simply compounds your trouble. Flights out of MDW on other carriers aren't much better but if you've got the money they've got the time. I didnt have the money
So assuming it was weather, why were the flights allowed to take off and land at MDW only to sit there for hours on end? Their weather people surely have algorithims to decide weather or not a flight should occur. this would include inbound as well as outbound (unsafe landing is just as deadly as unsafe take off)
Assuming it was staffing, why wouldn't you cancel flights coming into MDW since tarmac wait violations are pretty expensive (1.1 million dollars is what united got hit with for an incident at Ohare in July 2012 that left people on the tarmac from between 3 and 4 hours)
So why not cancel going into midway in either case? The federal regulations have fines as high as 27500 per passenger. This would surely be enough to incentivize simply cancelling flights and allowing people to reschedule.
If midway had open gates elsewhere (which they did), why was southwest not using them? I dont know what goes into that but it seems like it'd be in the best interests of passenger safety and goodwill to run skeleton crews to the empty gates and get people off planes even if their bags stay there
My guess is this: Employees called out. They had the gates and planes but not the people. Planes were having to wait longer to be refuelled, de-iced, restocked and so forth. This creates delays on the tarmac. Crews that are being moved to other planes simply can't be moved to other planes as thyere stuck on a runway. because of this planes can't take off. Planes cant take off meaning new planes cant take their spots at the gate resulting in further back ups, which causes those other planes' crews to get even further behind. Compound that with a system wide delay of takeoffs for a couple hours and have all the planes arrive at once and you get an even greater bottleneck....and so it goes in a horrid Katamari of inconvenience and unexpected cost incursions for all parties involved.
As much as I like Southwest I think they dropped the ball pretty hard on this one and I think theyre going to get burnt. That RDU flight spent at LEAST 5 hours on the runway.
By the way, that whole, "dont call the 1800 number" schpiel from a gate agent was really awful advice. EVERY bit of progress I made last night with bags and rebooking was made over the phone rather than with a human. Once our flight was cancelled it took me about an hour and a half to get the luggage reconciled and a flight rebooked. Another 15 minutes and I had a hotel room for Friday and Saturday night.
So what have I learned? First off, NEVER book thru midway. it is a pit of scum forgotten by God and is worse than Miami's airport in terms of dilapidation. They look to be very prone to weather problems. Luckily in the other times I was supposed to go there my flights just got cancelled before we were to end up there or got re-routed thru other cities.
What else? buying travel insurance is a really good idea if you're spending actual money. I wasnt spending actual money for these flights (points and a couple of flight vouchers) so atleast i'm blessed in that I don't have a 1500 dollar hole in my wallet with nothing to show for it. i'm out a car rental and thats it. I had to get some new hotel rooms that i didnt plan on spending money on and pay some cab fare but thats not a huge deal all things considered.
what else? The hard rock in chicago is cheaper than anything near midway. cab fare is about 25 bucks from midway to the hotel. make use of this resource as its a nice room with good views and the staff always has really fantastic customer service. (well atleast this one and the one in Biloxi do)
The airport and Southwest aren't being very forthcoming as far as they delays/cancellations go and are vaguely blaming it on "weather" but it thats the case why was it effecting the out bound flights from an airport which is apparently safe to land in? I imagine that dangerous coming = dangerous going
On a final note, the car rental places that were open and had cars were quoting 1200 dollars for a subcompact. way to price yourselves out of the market guys, Im pretty sure people can get limos to other towns with airports for cheaper than that
Here's an article that gives a pretty good account. Here's another thing, flights are just "cancelled" rather than "rescheduled".....this is going to lead to some people being stuck at midway for a couple of days
http://www.myfoxchicago.com/story/24354 ... an-3-hours
Bright side:
-maybe I get to see the fire station from the movie backdraft?
-its been a learning experience and it was the kind of scenario i used to worry about a lot. this isnt that terrible if you have a couple hundred dollars to throw at it
-I hear theres some good food around. whatever was outside the hard rock smelled absolutely delicious when we got in around 345 am. Like chocolate chip muffins or brownies. I plan on finding that today.
-the view from the 29th floor is nice
-maybe ill go to the sears tower
If I had my bags I'd be heading to one of the local ski/tubing/sledding hills. Oh well. At least the place I am staying tonight has an indoor pool.
First World Problems.....
