Business Lessons Learned from Southwest Airlines Holiday Meltdown

 

Last week I shared with you the travel lessons learned from the Southwest Airlines holiday debacle. Today, I’ll share with you some basic business lessons learned from the Southwest Airlines holiday meltdown.

 

Southwest Airlines encountered a boatload of problems which were going to take time to mediate. They dug themselves an even deeper hole – costing even more time and money – because of how they reacted (or didn’t react). No matter what your team’s or company’s size is, you can definitely learn from Southwest Airlines’ costly mistakes.

 

Communication is Key

 

*Notify your customers as soon as you are aware there is a problem.

I never received a flight cancellation notice. Four hours after I went into the Southwest Airlines app and happened to discover my flight was canceled, I received an email stating my flight “might be impacted.” I should’ve received an immediate notification the moment the cancelation happened, and I certainly should have received that “might be impacted” email as soon as the delays and cancelations started days earlier.

 

*All customers are important, not just your perceived VIPs!

A couple of days after our canceled flight, I received via email an explanation and profuse apology through my business account, which was NOT the account I’d used to book this holiday trip to visit family. My personal account didn’t receive an explanation email until the following week. Apparently, Southwest Airlines places a greater value on its business customers and doesn’t care about its leisure customers.

 

I was irritated with Southwest when I saw my flight was cancelled, my irritation was soon replaced with fury and disgust after experiencing the above.

 

So much time is lost when communication isn’t clear or isn’t done at all. It’s important that if something goes wrong, you notify all of your customers immediately, noting that those who are directly affected will receive additional communication with specific instructions.

 

Not only were customers inconvenienced and angered in the moment because of extreme delays and cancellations, but salt was added to the wound by their lack of communication during the fiasco, as well as their follow-up after. This will have long-term effects. How many of the 1,000,000 people affected by their operational and communication failures will not only never want to fly with them again, but will also share their hatred of Southwest Airlines with everyone they know?

 

*Your employees need to be kept in the loop, too.

Just as customers should be updated on the situation, so should employees. Ideally there should be a platform for two-way communications, but at the very least there should be a place where employees can check postings for internal updates. It’s bad for morale and a major setback in trust for leadership’s decision-making skills and operational capabilities if your own people have no idea what’s going on or what action they should take.

 

Infrastructure Should be Kept Updated – and Tested

 

*In the long run, band aids will be more costly than foundational repairs.

Southwest Airlines has been operating with outdated systems. And they’re not the only ones. The FAA computer disaster on January 11, 2023, was the result of outdated systems. Other airlines are in the same boat. Sure, it’s nice to make a bigger profit by delaying costly repairs and updates, but in the end, those past profits will likely be eaten up – and then some – by the exponentially expensive fixes and reimbursements you’ll need to make when your systems go belly up.

 

*Contingency plans are an absolute must.

You can’t forecast every possible mishap or disastrous scenario that might possibly happen, but you can examine worst case results of any type of disaster or outage. What are your contingency plans for key information storage and delivery systems, operational systems and communication platforms? What will temporarily replace the primary systems if they fail? What are your Plan B and Plan C for everything within your operation?

 

*Emergency drills should be run yearly at minimum.

Do you remember when you had fire drills in school when you were a kid? Growing up in L.A., we also had earthquake drills. Today, many schools have lockdown drills. The same types of drills should be run with businesses, not only for those situations, but for operational contingencies. There should be an emergency operational guide all employees can refer to, and a mock situation should be addressed. It might cost you one morning of everyone’s work time to do this, but that’s a heck of a lot cheaper than the expensive loss Southwest Airlines will experience, currently estimated at nearly $1 billion.

 

Restitution shouldn’t cause more strife.

 

*Give customers clear steps to take.

Where can customers submit their restitution request? What qualifies and what doesn’t qualify as restitution? In the text-heavy emails from Southwest Airlines, there wasn’t a section heading for Reimbursement. Instead, you had to read through every single word to locate the words “refund” and “reimbursement,” which were not in bold nor linked. Instead, only the word here was emphasized, as in click here. Furthermore, when you went to their refund and reimbursement page, you had to scroll down and “click open” one of the questions in the FAQ section to find the instructions for submitting reimbursement. They definitely were not trying to make it simple to figure out what to do.

 

*Do not make the process difficult.

If you want your customers to provide documentation, then allow room for it. Southwest Airlines allowed only five documents to be uploaded for the reimbursement submission. If you have receipts for car rental, hotel, multiple stops for gas, meals and so forth, you’re going to have a lot more than five receipts. Southwest Airlines didn’t honor my non-transportation related expenses (even though the only reason why they were incurred is because we had to drive home from Los Angeles to San Antonio instead of fly) and shorted me almost $100 on the rest of the reimbursement because there wasn’t room to upload those receipts. Should I waste more time fighting with them or write this experience off as my goodbye and middle finger salute to a horribly run company?

 

*Credits for future use don’t cut it.

Southwest drink tickets and A-List status seem like a nice peace offering, but they don’t replace the nearly $1,000 I had to spend to extend my holiday and drive home 1,410 miles. Plus, those items only have value if I actually fly on Southwest Airlines again. If you want to offer those gifts as an additional apology, that’s nice. But reimbursement of expenses incurred for company failure is the right thing to offer.

 

I’ve tried really hard to be empathetic. After all, what if I couldn’t arrive to deliver a training because I became ill or was in an accident or experienced travel delays and cancellations? All of those are outside of my control, as was the weather for Southwest Airlines, which was the initial issue. But the fact that they’d chosen to not update antiquated systems, not have contingency plans, not communicate clearly during and after the ordeal, and then make it harder on me for them to make amends, made me let kindness and empathy fall by the wayside.

My company is infinitely smaller than Southwest Airlines, but you can be sure that if I’m ever stupid enough to not communicate during a failure to deliver and not build in contingency plans and not deliver on something I promised, I sure as hell will do anything I can to apologize and make up for it – instead of continuing to make things harder for those who were affected.

 

 

For the complete guide to preparing for the best and worst of travel experiences, check out The Great Escape: A Vacation Planner for Busy People Who Want to Take a Real Break from Work & Life.

 

About Helene Segura, M.A. Ed., CPO®

As The Inefficiency Assassin™, Time Management Fixer Helene Segura empowers professionals on the go with the tools to slay lost time. Personal inefficiency at work leads to increased stress levels, lower morale, higher absenteeism, more turnover – and rising spending on employee health care and hiring. Why not improve productivity, decrease stress levels, and increase profits instead?The author of four books – two of which were Amazon best-sellers – Helene Segura has been the featured organization expert in more than 200 media interviews. She has coached hundreds of clients to productivity success and performance improvement by applying neuroscience and behavioral modification techniques to wipe out destructive, time-wasting habits.Helene turns time management on its head by sharing both client case studies and pop culture examples to teach her mind-bending framework for decreasing interruptions, distractions and procrastination so that companies can spend more time generating revenue.

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