Severe Irregular Ops

[AstroLounge]

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.

Everything You stated is RIGHT ON THE MONEY! I find it ironic that YOU are retired and still care enough to PROBLEM SOLVE. Too bad the current Management is oblivious to all their blunders and look into some very sound, practical suggestions.

 

[PI Blue]

Jim's experience in this industry...well you can't buy it.

LOL...I sure he says YES you can.

BB you exactly right with your post and we can only hope that someone...somewhere...will listen.

 

[MarkMyWords]

Trvlr64 -

Sorry about the early morning wake up call on Monday - What time would you recommend that they call? First people complain that they didn't call, now you complain that they did. Not knowing exactly what Monday morning start up was like, but if there were several mainline and express cancellations and delays, the goal is to get everyone called within 90 minutes of departure. If you PM your flight number, I can determine the time that the flight cancelled.

Jim -

As always, you are the loud and clear voice of reason. Everything that you said is spot on. The one thing that they did do is allow people to start rebooking and instituted flexible travel policy 2 days before the storm. Everything else should have been done. No arguement there.

Ramp Rat -

You are also correct. For some reason some of the cancelled flights in SHARES are not coming over to the website properly. Part of that is because of a problem with the connection and scripting from SABRE DECS (FOS) to SHARES. This all should have been figured out prior to SHARES cutover, but it wasn't.

ussnark -

If you can find grounds to dismiss me, feel free. I am at least trying to find solutions to problems and not just #### about them.

rjh -

Sometimes it just doesn't pay to come out of hiding....guess it is back to not giving a flying fig about making a difference. Come on here and you become a target.

Careerfurloughee -

If everything was Doug and Scott's responsbility, then why have the other 35K employees. While they are responsible for the "big picture items, they have little control over every aspect of the daily operation of the airline. There is plenty of blame to go around to many people at the top of this tree.

Any other comments?

 

[BoeingBoy]

The one thing that they did do is allow people to start rebooking and instituted flexible travel policy 2 days before the storm.

Yes they did, with apparent restrictions (apparent because I have no idea how requests were actually handled):

1 - Move entire itinerary forward or back up to 7 days. What about those in the middle of their trip who only wanted to change the return portion?

2 - Not change the length of stay. See above, what if they wanted to return earlier or later to miss the storm? What if they wanted to leave earlier or later but couldn't change the return date?

3 - The fine print - tickets bought thru certain outlets may not have all the benefits available to them. Why exclude a percentage of affected passengers?

Admittedly, if everyone that was scheduled to fly the day of the storm asked to travel the day before, US couldn't accomodate them all. But why not accomodate all that were possible? It appears that #1 would eliminate about 50% of those traveling that Friday. #2 and #3 would eliminate more, though I have no idea how many. I guess the question is "Why didn't we have a 100% load factor on the Thursday before the storm hit? Could it be that lots of passengers didn't notice the advisory on the website? I don't recall (and can't find) a press release advising that ticket changes would be allowed.

Jim

 

[BuffaloJoe]

Yes they did, with apparent restrictions (apparent because I have no idea how requests were actually handled):

1 - Move entire itinerary forward or back up to 7 days. What about those in the middle of their trip who only wanted to change the return portion?

2 - Not change the length of stay. See above, what if they wanted to return earlier or later to miss the storm? What if they wanted to leave earlier or later but couldn't change the return date?

3 - The fine print - tickets bought thru certain outlets may not have all the benefits available to them. Why exclude a percentage of affected passengers?

Jim

Jim
Your #1 When did they post that on the Web, thursday evening? Move the trip up 7 days, I feel like George Carlin on this one, How the Heck do you move a trip up 7 days if they only posted this 12 hours (being generous with the time) before the crap all came out of the sky?
#2 can't change length of stay? What if a person was going to a wedding for the weekend?

It just seems that they have a Template that they just change the dates and areas on. There has to be someone who knows how to use MS Word.

#3 What do they mean by certain outlets? Orbitz,Expedia, travelocity?

This is from the Web Site

Cancellations Prior to Departure Date
US Airways agents make every attempt to contact customers when their flight cancels prior to day of departure. The Reservations Assistance Department rebooks customers and handles callbacks for customers prior to the day of departure. It is recommended that all customers reconfirm their itinerary 24 to 48 hours prior to departure.

The above would apply to saturday/sunday and monday flights. I know AA has a computer generated sysytem that either text message, cell phone or e-mail, that the customer sets up. This stuff should have been automatic, as soon as flight data gets entered. But it appears that the flight status data doesn't get entered. They had all this time and it went wrong. Maybe by the next winter season, they may get their act together. It can only get better.

 

[mbmbbost]

The flexible travel policy was somewhat limited until well into the storm, if I remember correctly. I called Thursday because I was booked to travel FLL/BOS Friday. BOS was not listed, even though airports north and south of it were included. So I couldn't change travel plans. I'm sure there were plenty of other people heading to/from BOS that would have rescheduled if given the option.

 

[BuffaloJoe]

The flexible travel policy was somewhat limited until well into the storm, if I remember correctly. I called Thursday because I was booked to travel FLL/BOS Friday. BOS was not listed, even though airports north and south of it were included. So I couldn't change travel plans. I'm sure there were plenty of other people heading to/from BOS that would have rescheduled if given the option.

OK that's basically what I thought, no prior planning and it leaves the customer in a position that could have been avoided if there were adequate notice. And this storm didn't pop up overnight.