dlaue

Kudos to all of us WN passengers who seem to put up with this electronic incompetence time after time.

For the management of Southwest, razzberries. It is all they deserve.

bobunf

Kudos seems a strange sentiment in regards to a near complete web outage lasting about 36 hours preventing virtually all booking and check-ins, accompanied by an essentially complete breakdown in the phone system. Then partial functionality restored for another 12 hours, and, finally, almost full functionality after more than 48 hours. The hotel and car reservation systems are still not functioning as of 11:30 PM Friday, June 4 - the third full day of a compromised website

The revenue loss must run into the millions of dollars. Add to that the effect on customer loyalty and really bad publicity. I'd call it a major management failure.

"Kudos to all of us WN passengers who seem to put up with this electronic incompetence time after time.

"For the management of Southwest, razzberries. It is all they deserve."

+1+

Electronic incompetence is right on. Zero kudos for incompetence. What does this say about other service issues with WN?

LegalTender

Polishing GK's laurels and attaboys would not have been my summation.

nsx

Getting into the mess deserves blame. Salvaging a partial success (as far as customers being able to book sale tickets) while taking some risk of extending the fiasco deserves praise. It's not just one or the other.

Most of the posters here would have ended the sale Thursday, producing a much inferior result for customers.

ursine1

Yeah. No.

No one in management deserves any pats on the back.They deserve to be reprimanded for allowing the situation to happen in the first place. This was a corporate blunder of epic proportions.

If (and it's a big if) the meltdown was actually caused only by the high customer volume, then they failed to anticipate the interest the "sale" would generate. That's business 101.

Much credit should however be given to the phone reps who kept their cool and helped legitimately frustrated customers throughout the (not yet over) nightmare.

ursine1

I don't really see that they had much of a choice at that point. Extending was the easiest route.

Smarter management would have immediately suspended the "sale" and escalated the system fix, so that loyal flyers could book last-minute flights, manage upcoming travel, and check in for flights.

Then they could have announced the return of the sale and ensured that their systems would be able to handle the volume.

They most likely didn't do that because the have no intention of actually fixing anything, so the system wouldn't work any better later.

They chose to muddle through and hope for the best. Ending the sale on time would possibly have opened them up to DOT action, so, as I said... I don't think they really had much choice.

mke9499

Sale fares are still available at this time, about one hour past supposed cut-off time.

I just booked another trip that I had been thinking about.

Still non-functioning on southwest.com are hotel and car booking engines.

spongenotbob

Kudos, seriously? For what?

For underinvesting in critical IT infrastructure for years, to the detriment of the rest of the airline, it's employees, and even it's customers?

For a pathetic non-response to one of the biggest eCommerce failures most of us have ever seen (for a company of this size)?

For playing the odds year after year until it finally bites them in the a$$?

I really like most of Southwest's front-line employees, and I really sense they work very hard, but this is an utter failure for management. If I were in WN management anywhere near this failure I would be expecting to find cardboard boxes stacked outside my office.

For me personally, I was seriously considering trying to focus as much of my (domestic) business travel onto WN as possible, but this incident has changed that. Back to AA/US I go, I guess. Real shame, really.

Hot Pocket

This was a major CF. Assuming it's over, I suppose I don't even know.


My workaround was, call in and have my A-list recognized. Got an agent right away, who was very cool and able to handle a bunch of transactions, which varied from basic cash bookings, to Companion Pass, to points, etc.

Great job to this particular agent.

Beyond that...

mke9499

I had similar, positive call-in experience last night. This is one A-List perk that I've never appreciated that much, until yesterday!

tatterdema

Well, they are not available now. Personally I think they should have run them through the weekend. I was able to refare one trip, but never could get in to refare the others.

Lol, when is a sale not a sale? When you cannot purchase it.

dc2

I was able to get on yesterday and I was underwhelmed. No sale fares for when/where I wanted to go.
I was also unable to add any CP fares on--kept getting an error.
Today everything seems to be working. Fingers crossed.

mke9499

Though promoted as ending at 11:59 p.m. (at the respective time zone of the originating city), the sale actually ended at 2:00 a.m. CDT, an extra two hours for me.

The low fare calendar has returned this morning.

tatterdema

It was over by 11pm pst for me...?? At least that is when I was able to check, and it was gone.

COS_Flyer

One of the main advantages of being A-list is being able to get an adequate seat without having to buy early bird checkin- but to get a good seat requires that I login and get my boarding pass well before I arrive at the airport. With the website down, I'd have had no way to do that this past week.

I fly WN mostly because they have a better record (with me, at least) of getting me and my bags (if I check one) to our agreed destination around the time promised. The ability to pick my seat and have overhead bin space for my carry-on bag is pretty significant. If I get caught in one of the fare sale-related computer meltdowns, I'm going to start looking at other options again.

I hope that WN has someone monitoring this forum so that it knows what aspects of its service are important to its higher revenue flyers