The holiday debacle that left Southwest Airlines passengers stranded all over the country will be the subject of a U.S. Senate hearing this week.
After waiting hours and spending Christmas at an airport, with no luggage, no transportation alternatives and, eventually, thousands of dollars in expenses, Hope Grandon tells Senator Maria Cantwell (D-Washington) she went weeks receiving only form letters from Southwest ,and says she had to fight to be reimbursed. “We were also fortunate enough to have savings and credit available to us to cover those charges,” Grandon says, “but even with those resources, it resulted in a lot of anxiety wondering if we would, in fact, be reimbursed.” Grandon also says she doesn’t know how people who didn’t have the financial resources to cover large, additional, unexpected expenses the faced as they were left far from home.
One mother said her son got stuck in California after taking leave from his Army base in Georgia, when he needed some family support after losing several members of his battalion. Others talked about seeing crowded airports with people crying and waiting in line for food or to try to book another flight. One said they drove a rental car from Denver to Redmond, Oregon, and flew from there to SeaTac Airport just to get home.
Senator Cantwell says Southwest clearly had some back-end communication problems, and she plans to ask airline officials why that system hadn’t been update. Cantwell says she and her staff want to make sure everyone gets their money back, but she also wants to ensure there’s planning for the future, “for a transportation system that isn’t one-way communication but, in this case, we needed a lot more information so people could make wiser choices about what their alternatives were going to be.”
Cantwell says she also supports a “Passenger Bill of Rights” or some sort of consumer protection that includes sufficient communication when flights are canceled, and she’ll also talk about airline staffing issues at the Senate hearing with Southwest on Thursday. You can find more information and a link to a stream of the hearing here.
