Many students were devastated when their flights were unexpectedly canceled by Southwest Airlines during winter break. The flights were canceled due to staff shortages, severe weather and a computer malfunction. This forced students’ vacations to get delayed significantly or even canceled.
The Southwest Airlines mayhem had some people waiting at the airport all day for their flight.
“My flight changed gates about six times and it left at 10 p.m. when it was supposed to leave at 5:10 a.m.,” senior Matt Uhl said.
Many people were not able to see their families they intended to visit. Some of these trips were very time dependent, and these cancellations messed up their schedules with their families.
“My family had planned a trip to Texas to visit my grandparents over Christmas break and my flight got canceled. This meant I had to leave on Christmas Day and I wasn’t really able to spend Christmas with my grandparents. They made a whole brunch for us, but we weren’t able to enjoy it because we came so much later,” junior Erik Austegard said.
These cancellations left a lot of people confused and many things went missing and were difficult to recover.
“We were supposed to go to Florida but our flight got canceled when we were sitting in the gate, and they did not reschedule us. Our bags were also sent to Florida before we were, and there were multiple days where we had no idea where our luggage was. Our trip had to be cut in half, and we had to rebook on a different airline without getting our money back from Southwest,” junior Jay Wandell said.
There were many problems with getting refunds for these flight cancellations. Some refunds were not even given at all yet.
“My flight got canceled and I still had to pay for it. I ended up paying for four flights and I only took two,” Wandell added.
Even though Southwest is working on refunding people for their flight cancellations, most people still overpaid.
