Southwest Airlines may need to sharply cut flights, rethink its trademark point-to-point route network or take the expensive step of canceling large swaths of...
in order to make sure it could handle a surge of leisure travelers.
“One of the emerging best practices that is so painful is to preemptively cancel if there is bad weather in one region,” Pomeroy said. “But preemptively canceling is so hard because people can get upset and you lose money, especially if the weather isn’t that bad.”longtime leader Mike Van De Ven First, executives created a system for the company to take over pilot and flight attendant rescheduling manually, using a team of about 1,000 volunteers at corporate headquarters who made phone calls to find out where crew members were and when they could fly again. Second, it needs to make incremental patches and changes to its crew modeling software. Third, he said, the company needs to come up with plans for key airports where pilots and flight attendants are based.
Southwest may have to change some longstanding company practices to get to the core of the problems though, said Kevin Woods, the Southlake-based founder of“Southwest has invested in their own technology, and it’s been one of its major problems,” Woods said. “Outside technology is almost always better and more reliable because you have experts building it who work across several companies.”
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