Christmas meltdown ‘won’t ever occur once more’

With the height Christmas journey season simply days away, Southwest Airlines‘ CEO vowed that the service is not going to have a repeat of final 12 months’s meltdown that stranded hundreds of shoppers and price the airline greater than $1 billion.

“It will never happen again,” Bob Jordan stated at an occasion Thursday on the Wings Membership in New York.

Final 12 months, Southwest canceled near 17,000 flights over the essential Christmas and New 12 months’s vacation interval because it didn’t get well from extreme climate that gripped a lot of the nation. Rival carriers have been additionally affected however recovered extra rapidly.

Southwest struggled with staffing points as storms left flight attendants and pilots out of place for his or her subsequent flights, hundreds of passenger luggage piled up, and planes have been behind on de-icing.

The service has been stocking up in de-icing and different winter-weather tools to arrange for the season all year long. It has additionally upgraded expertise.

“Winter will not be perfect,” Jordan stated. However he added that the airline is ready for the season, pointing to a fast restoration after heavy snowfall in October at its key airport in Denver.