Southwest Airlines may have set a record regarding the number of negative Yelp reviews this week. The company put on a masters class of dysfunction, stranding passengers from coast to coast and ticking off millions of people, including the Head of the Department of Transportation.
Families had to deal with relatives missing plans, being stranded at airports, and multiple days of misery. One man in Southern California decided to take matters into his own hands when his daughter was stranded in Denver on Christmas Eve.
After she waited out two days of delays and cancellations and then being re-booked on a flight that wasn’t taking off until New Year’s Eve, Vinay Patel of Simi Valley got in his car and drove 1,100 miles through a blizzard to get his daughter in Colorado.
It took him over 15 hours each way to get her. He put over 2,000 miles on his car, but it was worth it for him. Here’s what he told reporters.
“We can see the change in her voice when she heard that we were in the city of Denver and 15 minutes away from her,” Patel said. “You can feel the difference in the excitement of her voice.”
What annoyed customers were the need for more communication or better communication dealing with passengers regarding cancelled flights. Patel said he would have left a day earlier if Southwest had their act together.
”Their logistics system sucks. They were misrepresentative to the customers. Even when I left Columbus, they knew their system was screwed up and put us on those planes and got us all in the queue.”
Just on Thursday alone of this week, Southwest canceled about 300 flights in So Cal and over 2,000 nationally.
Add comment