Southwest Airlines says holiday meltdown will 'certainly' hit fourth-quarter results
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Southwest Airlines' holiday meltdown will "certainly" hit its fourth-quarter results, executives said Thursday, adding it will take several weeks to work through affected travelers' reimbursement requests. The systemwide chaos stranded hundreds of thousands of customers over the holiday week and drew scrutiny from Washington. The low-cost airline slashed schedules over the last several days, flying just about one-third of its planned flights, in a desperate effort to stabilize its operation and get planes and crews where they need to go. Southwest said it expects to operate a normal schedule on Friday. It's canceled 39 flights scheduled for Friday, according to FlightAware, down from more than 2,300 on Thursday. "We have all hands on deck and tested solutions in place to support the restored operation. I'm confident, but I'm also cautious," CEO Bob Jordan said in a staff memo Thursday.

Travelers at Baltimore Washington International airport deal with the impact of Southwest Airlines canceling more than 12,000 flights around the Christmas holiday weekend across the country and in Baltimore, Maryland, December 27, 2022. Michael McCoy | Reuters

The airline also resumed selling tickets for Friday, after a pause it implemented before it stabilized its schedule, said Jordan, a more than three-decade Southwest veteran who became CEO in February. Southwest's operation unraveled over the holiday week after brutal winter weather swept across the U.S. When most airlines had recovered at the end of last week, Southwest's problems worsened. Executives cited challenges including overloaded internal scheduling platforms crucial to getting crews matched with flights. Executives on Thursday vowed to improve crew scheduling platforms and said that modernization efforts were already underway but noted such projects take years. On a call with reporters on Thursday, Chief Commercial Officer Ryan Green said there "will certainly be an impact to the fourth quarter." But executives declined to provide an estimate of how much the disruptions will cost the airline in total. A similar incident in October 2021 cost the airline about $75 million, the carrier said last year, but this event lasted longer, with more travelers flying because of the holidays and sharply higher fares. The carrier previously said it expected quarterly revenue to rise as much as 17% over 2019, when it brought in close to $6 billion.

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