Nearly all Southwest flights from Philadelphia International canceled as travel woes continue

Nearly all Southwest flights heading in and out of Philadelphia International Airport were canceled Wednesday as the airline’s travel woes continue.

Twenty-three Southwest flights were canceled as of Wednesday afternoon, according to the tracking website FlightAware. Twenty-two Southwest flights at the airport are already canceled for Thursday, as the airline continues to grapple with cancellations stemming from a deadly winter storm that has disrupted air travel since late last week.

Three Southwest flights scheduled for Wednesday — a flight from Philadelphia to Chicago and two inbound flights, one from St. Louis and one from Orlando — were listed as being on time. A Philadelphia airport spokesperson urged customers to stay in touch with their airlines to get the most up-to-date flight status information.

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Southwest has been impacted more than any other airline, and continues to experience mass disruptions across the country. Of the more than 2,800 domestic U.S. flights canceled on Wednesday, more than 2,500 of them were Southwest.

Those visiting Philadelphia as well as locals trying to leave were still feeling the Southwest squeeze Wednesday.

Theresa Reutlinger, 69, a hay farmer in Muskogee, Okla., saw her flight home from Philadelphia canceled on Tuesday. Reutlinger had traveled to the area with her husband, Rick, to visit their sons for the holidays, and was supposed to leave Wednesday morning, but received a text message from the airline at 3 a.m. saying that the flight wasn’t happening. Because she has livestock to care for back home, as well as customers whose livestock relies on her hay, that wasn’t an option.

She checked for flights online, but the earliest return trip Southwest could offer was Jan. 1. Instead, Reutlinger booked a first-class flight through American — a first for her.

“I have never flown first class in my life,” Reutlinger said. “We’re fortunate enough to be able to charge it on our credit card. Some people aren’t in that position.”

Rita Roberts, 51, of Williamstown, had a flight to Fort Lauderdale canceled Tuesday morning, too — which she found out about only after arriving at PHL. Instead of rebooking another flight, she, her husband, Dave, and their two children decided to make the 1,170-mile drive. The trip took nearly 24 hours with traffic and rest stops, but the group arrived in Florida for a family vacation early Wednesday morning.

The airline, Roberts said, offered her a refund voucher for the tickets, as well as $300 in vouchers per person to use toward travel on Southwest flights, which she called a “nice gesture.” But after her experience this week, she isn’t so sure about doing business with the airline again.

“We don’t know if we want to fly Southwest anymore,” said Roberts, a vice president at Peirce College. “We were determined to have a vacation, so here it is.”

According to Southwest’s website, those affected by canceled flights can request a refund by filling out a form online. The company notes in an online FAQ that it will “honor reasonable requests for reimbursement” for food, hotel, and transportation costs incurred by flight cancellations between Dec. 24 and Jan. 2.

Problems were expected to continue into Thursday, when more than 2,300 Southwest flights had already been canceled across the country.

The travel disruptions have drawn scrutiny from federal officials.

“Their system really has completely melted down,” Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg told CNN on Tuesday night. “From what I can tell, Southwest is unable to locate even where their own crews are, let alone their own passengers, let alone baggage.”

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“I made clear that our department will be holding them accountable for their responsibilities to customers, both to get them through this situation and to make sure that this can’t happen again,” Buttigieg said.

Sen. Maria Cantwell (D., Wash.), chair of the Senate Commerce Committee, said in a statement that the committee would investigate the causes of the disruptions at Southwest and their impact on customers.

“Many airlines fail to adequately communicate with consumers during flight cancellations,” Cantwell wrote. “Consumers deserve strong protections, including an updated consumer refund rule.”

Southwest Airlines CEO Bob Jordan apologized to employees and customers in a video posted to the airline’s website Tuesday evening, saying the “giant puzzle” of staffing issues could take days to solve.

“We have some real work to do in making this right,” Jordan said. “For now, I want you to know that we’re committed to that.”

The issues at Southwest appear to stem from a combination of factors, including the busy holiday travel season and a deadly winter storm that impacted much of the country. Chicago Midway International Airport and Denver International Airport — home to two of Southwest’s largest hubs — were hit especially hard by the storm, which has killed more than 30 people in Western New York.

An internal company memo from Dec. 21 obtained by the Washington Post indicates that Southwest had concerns over the worker shortage in Denver. According to the memo, Chris Johnson, the airline’s vice president of ground operations, declared a “state of operational emergency” due to the “unusually high number of absences” of employees out for sick days and personal days. That emergency, Johnson wrote, would require employees to work overtime if necessary, and the airline would not grant requests for personal days.

Airline officials have indicated the company was not short-staffed ahead of the storm. Instead, Southwest has cited “the inability of internal logistics and scheduling systems to recover after widespread disruptions caused by the storm,” the Washington Post reports.

Unlike other airlines, Southwest uses a point-to-point system, which means planes go from destination to destination without returning to a hub (Philadelphia International, for instance, is an American Airlines hub). That means bad weather affects more than just singular routes around the country; it backs up the entire system, according to the New York Times.

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Adding to the backlog of travelers: Southwest has a policy of not rebooking its passengers on other airlines.

As a result of the storm, flight crews ended up out of place and not in the cities the airlines needed them to be in for operations to continue. That cascaded into the thousands of cancellations, according to spokesperson Jay McVay.

“We’ve been chasing our tails trying to catch up and get back to normal safely,” McVay told reporters Tuesday afternoon.