mfirst

There have been some recent comments about travel waivers - due to thunderstorms and heat.
I have several flights (on a kinda tight schedule to smaller cities) over the next few days that missing a flight might cause a headache
Is it just me and this moment in time - is UA being more cautious and proactive?

Do we have any sense as to the relationship between some of these warning and waivers and the odds of a flight being significantly delayed and/or canceled?

-m

(please, do not turn this into a political discussion about global warming.....)

WineCountryUA

ORD, IAH, EWR are well known for summer afternoon storms.

A few years back, ORD went a string 8+ weeks with at least one weather waiver a week

Not uncommon for multiple hubs to have issues in the same week.

4 / 5 years ago, UA started to issue waivers a bit more proactively. Much was made in this forum of the frequency of those waivers.
United's Travel/Weather Waivers: Ever Expanding?

With summer months averaging 10-15 per month

DELee

Ha! Hoisted upon own petard from my posts a few years back.

I haven't tried to recalculate any stats from 2018 or 2019 but it's clear that the waivers give UA the flexibility to deal especially with weather events.

But, when I have time, I keep posting the latest waivers to this forum.

David

threeoh

There are also two kinds of waivers, I've noticed:

1. Hub-only waivers for more mild weather, like thunderstorms. The main idea here is I think you can re-route through another hub if it isn't your destination, but most O&D travelers will probably try to continue their journey unless they were looking to change their plans anyway. Even if their flight is cancelled or delayed they are likely to make it same day, just a little late. But all of the GRR-ORD-PHL pax can reroute GRR-EWR.PHL if O'Hare is having t-storms, reducing the total number of delayed passengers and freeing up capacity at O'Hare to accommodate pax from missed connections and cancelled flights.

2. Waivers that cover a large swatch of geography due to a wide-spread severe weather event like a snow storm, hurricane, or (in this case) unusual heat wave. A lot of flights are going to get cancelled/delayed and people might try to get out a day early or postpone travel till next week. Ground travel is also likely affected so sometimes these waivers extend beyond the immediate area that is affected, and sometimes confusingly even mention airports that UA doesn't serve.

But if an outstation like GRR is hit by a localized event like a t-storm they're not likely to issue a waiver -- your flight is either cancelled or it's not. So they are more trigger-happy with the waivers for hubs because of the large number of flights impacted and the ability to route passengers around it.

mduell

I think it's more due to airline ops strategy than any weather changes (warming, cooling, or otherwise).

The long running and very flexible COVID related waivers gave the airline a peek at customer behavior with more flexibility that they hadn't been willing to experiment with before. Brough us changes like "permanent" no change fees, and I think also this more proactive approach to marginal weather conditions. Also contributed to by a large number of retirements/early retirements/furloughs in middle management bringing some new and different perspective/attitude about how to best run the airline.

garykung

I would say it is location-dependent, i.e. some locations are more sensitive and some are not.

I would say there is virtually no relationship. FWIW - SFO can have travel waiver for weeks. And yet, the delay/cancellation due to the condition of waiver was minimal.

Collierkr

Keep in mind waivers are our friend. Without them we could be screwed.