Southwest called it a “technical glitch.” Travelers called it a nightmare.
When Southwest Airlines’ computers malfunctioned last Sunday — Los Angeles International Airport referred to it in a tweet as a “nationwide passenger processing system outage” — the airline was forced to check in many travelers manually at the airport.
The result? Hundreds of flight delays, and thousands of delayed passengers, some of whom were stranded.
But in the “cheer up, it could be worse” vein, these “technical issues” are the kind of thing that will only get worse.
Southwest, like most airlines, is increasingly automated, moving away from both paper and humans. Oddly enough, those with paper boarding passes were more or less fine. But people with their boarding passes on their phones were out of luck and needed to see an airport agent.
And long gone are the days when all check-in desks at the airport have agents. Or even that most desks and kiosks have agents. The idea now is that passengers can check themselves in, with human assistance only for checked bags and out-of-the-ordinary issues.
This new model works fine when few passengers have issues. But on other days …
Southwest employees did the best they could, working hard to help get passengers on their way, and in some cases doing things like handing out water and pitching canopies for shade at Los Angeles International Airport. But they didn’t have anywhere near the numbers to process everyone quickly.
And it doesn’t take a massive problem to overload the system. On a trip returning from Maui a couple of years ago, United canceled a single flight on a narrow-body plane. My family was lucky. We were nearly first in line, and I had my own airline computer link. But we came back to the gate more than two hours later, after lunch, and they were still rebooking a line of people.
Sometimes, when airline computer systems fail, phone agents can help if it’s not a system-wide failure. And travel agents may have access to alternate systems to rebook passengers.
In this case, though, because it was an airport issue involving boarding passes, the only phone help anyone could give was to advise travelers to manually print their boarding passes before going to the airport.
Parenthetical thought: Even when there aren’t glitches, my personal advice to travelers is to always print a boarding pass in advance when possible. Mobile scanners are imperfect things, emails can get lost, and cellphones run out of battery.
In this case, eventually the “glitch” got fixed, but while Southwest said only 450 out of 3,600 flights scheduled on Sunday were delayed, there were long lines reported around the country.
It could have been much worse. While the warm weather made things especially uncomfortable for those waiting outside in, for example, Los Angeles and Las Vegas, there were no major storms. Sundays are one of the busier travel days of the week, but this could have happened during the height of summer or during a holiday period.
On the other hand, to my mind, these kind of hellish travel days can only increase in the future. Yes, technology is improving, but it’s not perfect. And even though airline customer service salaries> today are not that much above minimum wage, the more airlines think they can automate a process, the more they will.
Perhaps W.B. Yeats presaged airline travel when he wrote that when “things fall apart, the center cannot hold.”
Janice Hough is a California-based travel agent a travel blogger and a part-time comedy writer. A frequent flier herself, she’s been doing battle with airlines, hotels, and other travel companies for over three decades. Besides writing for Travelers United, Janice has a humor blog at Leftcoastsportsbabe.com (Warning, the political and sports humor therein does not represent the views of anyone but herself.)
