One of the hundreds of thousands of passengers affected by Southwest Airlines’s cancellation of more than 15,000 flights last week amid internal systems failures has filed a lawsuit accusing the carrier of breach of contract.
Southwest’s tickets, however, include a contract of carriage in which the lawsuit says the company is required to either give passengers the choice of taking the next available flight at no additional charge or provide them with a refund.
“His flight was canceled and there were no alternative Southwest flights to accommodate him from the Trip’s origin to his destination,” the lawsuit said. The airline did not comment on the lawsuit Tuesday, but in a statement said “several high priority efforts” were underway “to do right by our Customers” including the processing of refunds for canceled flights and reimbursing passengers for expenses incurred. The company said it launched aThe lawsuit proposes that anyone similarly affected after Dec. 24 join the case in a class action. A message left with Matthew Moreland, Jim Hall and Associates in Metairie, La.
Representatives of Southwest’s employee unions blamed the company’s reliance on archaic technology and its failures to upgrade its internal systems in recent years as the driving cause of problems. Chief executive Bob Jordan acknowledged last week that the storm exposed vulnerabilities that he vowed to fix.
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