Be proactive instead of reactive....
Everyone here knows that it only takes some rain for PHL to turn into a quagmire (no pun intended). Regardless of the forecast for PHL itself, it was pretty obvious that the NE was going to have a major storm on Friday, and that storm would impact PHL significantly.
- Allow change of travel plans without fees/penalties a day or two in advance. For every person that rebooks their Friday travel to another day, you've helped 2 people - the person changing and the person that now has another empty seat to be rebooked in on storm day.
- Pre-cancel some flights. Better to have the planes/crews where you want them when it's time to recover than to have them where Mother Nature or FAA duty limits put them.
- Think about using some pre-planned overflights of PHL (or whichever hub the bad weather is going to affect. In conjunction with #1, that could save a lot of passengers and front-line employees grief.
- Based on comments by agents here, either get QIK/Shares brought up to the 21st century or toss it out. Apparently rerouting passengers is a nightmare in QIK, taking far too long which leads to passengers waiting hours in line.
- As a corollary to that, if the airline is going to staff based on technology working 100% of the time, make damn sure that it works 100% of the time or fire the people responsible (and that might start with Kirby/Parker based on what was reportedly said). Otherwise, change the staffing.
In short, don't be stuck in the mind-set that the schedule has to be flown as published until the whole operation is a shambles and it takes a week to recover. (Actually, Parker said "by Monday" - the 10th day after the storm). You can run a decent airline or you can run a cheap airline, but it's nearly impossible to run a decent cheap airline.