The shockingly bad holiday week in air travel was really just about one company: Southwest Airlines, the low-cost carrier that was responsible for 70% of the 3,800 flight cancellations in the U.S. on Monday, and then an outsized amount again on Tuesday. But for employees of the beleaguered budget airline, the writing was on the wall for the company’s catastrophic last few days.
Southwest, which called off 5,500 flights just on Monday and Tuesday, according to flight tracking service Flight Aware, attributed the wave of cancellations to the winter weather in a statement Tuesday. “With consecutive days of extreme winter weather across our network behind us, continuing challenges are impacting our Customers and Employees in a significant way that is unacceptable. And our heartfelt apologies for this are just beginning,” the airline said. But with its major rival airlines reporting cancellations of only around 2% of their flights, there has to be more to this story.
