FlyerTalk Forums - View Single Post - Does Southwest hold planes for late connections?
Old Dec 26, 2011 | 2:39 pm
  #19  
wlau
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Originally Posted by Johnnyman7
Hi all,
There's a snowstorm predicted for Denver on Thursday, so I'm moving my flight from DEN to ONT up to Wednesday night. My new flight itinerary is DEN-SJC-ONT. The SJC connection time is 35 minutes.

I'm worried that we might have to be de-iced in DEN or a delay in the first leg of the planes journey (from O'Hare to Denver) causes the DEN-SJC leg to arrive late. The SJC-ONT flight is the last one of the day...in fact, it looks to be the last flight of the day from SJC to any Los Angeles-area airport. In your experience, will Southwest hold a plane for a missed connection?

Actually, my experience is that they won't hold the flight unless they are in a hub city and a lot of Px are late from a late arriving flight. This could be lesser of an issue for SWA. SWA almost always run late towards the end of the day, as the small day-long delays adds up. If you are on one of the later flights, chances are your outbound flight will be late.

The golden murphy's law for SWA is "when you are late due to their inbound delay, they won't hold the connecting outbound flight; but when you are ontime or early, they will hold the flight for someone else"!!!
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