freeflyin

Does WN ever reschedule flights after it has been cancelled? Last night my evening flight for Wednesday was cancelled due to the impending East coast storm. If the storm materializes as forecasted,it should be gone for 24 hours prior to the scheduled flight time.

nsx

I've never heard of that happening on any airline. I can't imagine how the airline could sell all the seats on short notice except in a panic situation like an incoming hurricane.

Often1

UA and AA routinely reinstate cancelled flights when they have cancelled due to MX and then locate a spare. Even though the aircraft may go out far from full, it may mean fewer pax to reroute and often occurs within a few hours of the cancellation.

For advance cancellations, e.g. a day or more ahead, I haven't seen it. The logistics of moving aircraft away from a storm system are just too difficult to move them back quickly.

knope2001

Ditto -- and the anecdotal supporting evidence of this is that WN tends to be comparably aggressive on proactive weather cancellations, and when forecast weather trouble comes in much less severe than predicated the howls of "but United is flying", "but Delta is flying" etc. are pretty predictable. Southwest does not reinstate previously-axed flights...pretty much ever, it would seem.

For what it's worth cancellations are probably a more difficult thing to execute (and on the flipside, reinstate) for a rather linear airline like Southwest versus other network carriers. Somebody like Delta is much more likely to run "out and back" trips, which are less complex to work through and potentially reinstate. Even with Southwest running de facto hubs there is still far more linear routing. Stuff like PIT-MCO-MDW-MCI-MKE-BOS. If Kansas City is expecting ice tomorrow it's a lot more difficult to ax the MCI flight without hacking up the entire line of flying. And once they do work it through, it's harder to unscramble the egg if MCI ends up getting rain instead.

GeorgeJ

AA cancelled a flight last October my wife was going to be on; they rebooked her on an unacceptable flight leaving about 12 hours later. When we finally got through on the phone several hours later, they had reinstated the cancelled flight, and they were able to rebook her on it...

This didn't happen last minute...it was either one or two days in advance that they did the cancellation.