Over the past few days, several Southwest customers have received emails with updates to their journeys. Which is nothing odd in itself, except this time, the new itineraries featured connecting flights that would, barring time-travel, literally be impossible to make.
When receiving emails from airlines with changes to your trip, it is best to pay extra attention to transfer times. Particularly it would seem if the sender is Southwest Airlines. Not just a very optimistic 45 minutes to dash across a sprawling Frankfurt Airport, these connection are actually impossible to make.
Connecting departure time before landing
As reported earlier Wednesday by USA Today, a number of the airline’s customers have received updated itineraries with inconceivable transfer times, or even entirely conflicting flights in the wrong direction.
A September family trip for Joanie Tran, a human resources manager from San Diego, changed from a direct flight to Reno, into one connecting via Oakland. One change of flights is usually not too complicated, and even to be expected during a pandemic. However, this connection only had ten minutes between flights. That is, the second one was to depart ten minutes before the first one had landed.
Her sister, who was meant to be on the same flight along with another 13 of their friends and family, was instead given a new reservation with two stops. Her new itinerary shows her trip beginning in Oakland, and stopping over in Las Vegas before continuing to Reno. The San Diego to Oakland leg was listed as her “returning flight,” but operates at the same time as the Oakland to Las Vegas.
Time-travel or computer malfunction?
Another woman named Karen Dolz received an email with her new itinerary for a September trip from Philadelphia to San Diego. While the new departure time is only an hour before the original flight, her new connecting flight from Chicago also departs an hour before she lands.
“So I guess Southwest has invented time travel?” Dolz reportedly joked on the carrier’s social media channels. However, as she works in IT, she suspects a glitch in the system is to blame.
Multiple options awaiting attention
Southwest did not comment on either the time travel or the computer aspect. It also did not address the absurdity of these proposed arrangements directly. While the airline was yet to respond to a request for comment from Simple Flying at the time of publication, a spokesperson told USA Today that,
“The (reservations) system sometimes suggests multiple options as it works to build the (new) journey. The examples you’ve shared require attention from our representatives to select the best options, and that’s a decision we prefer to make in consultation with our customers.”
Furthermore, they said that passengers have seats booked on new flights “pending further changes by an airline representative.” They also added that scenarios with inconvenient rebookings have “always happened,” but that Southwest is grateful to its customers for their patience with the number of changes due to schedule revisions.
However, Southwest still has a substantial amount of goodwill from earlier this week when we reported on how one of its flight attendants flew an adopted puppy 2,000 miles across the country on her day off.
Have you ever had a flight change that made absolutely no sense, or was particularly inconvenient? Let us know in the comments!