Southwest Airlines flights getting back on track following holiday week meltdown
SAN JOSE -- After a week of thousands of flight cancellations from coast-to-coast, affecting travelers at all three major Bay Area airports, Southwest Airlines operations rebounded on Friday.
"My flight wasn't delayed at all, everything was really great," said Kelsey Lee, who flew from San Diego to San Jose on Friday.
Southwest had numerous delays throughout the day at Mineta International Airport (SJC) in San Jose, but only three cancellations, according to FlightAware. On Thursday, there were 145 at SJC.
Shane Frugoli and his wife booked a trip to Las Vegas months ago for part two of their honeymoon and to see the 49ers take on the Raiders. Their flight was delayed, but they felt fortunate it wasn't canceled.
"The flight is delayed, not canceled. I'll take that," Frugoli said.
Throughout the week, they were anxious the trip might not happen due to the cancellations.
"We have our room booked, we have a show to go to, we've got the Niners game to go to - to watch them beat the Raiders," Frugoli said. "I was, like, 'Hey let's try and change our flight or book another airline.' Checking, it was like $2,700 each just to go to Vegas for, like, Delta and everything else."
Travelers on Friday were fortunate compared to most earlier in the week. On Tuesday, CBS News Bay Area met Aaron Guadarrama in the rental care line at SJC after several days of flight cancellations and at the time, unknowns about when he and his wife would be able to get home. They ended up driving back to Austin, Texas.
"We left at 4:30 a.m. on Wednesday morning and arrived last night at around 10:30-ish," he said.
When asked if he regretted the decision to drive home, when Southwest operations resumed as normal on Friday, Guadarrama said no.
"No, I believe I made the right choice," he said. "Again, there was that 50-50 chance that I wouldn't have been home until Monday or Tuesday of next week."
Aside from the headache, he says he had to front a lot of money to navigate the situation.
"It came out to about $820, with the rental, hotel, gas, food," he said.
The airline said it would "honor reasonable requests for reimbursement for meals, hotel, and alternate transportation such as rental cars, or tickets on other airlines."
Guadarrama hopes that process doesn't drag out.
"I've got a confirmation number, a letter, a number -- where I'm at and all that stuff. I just have to keep following up," he said. "I'm not going to be so hurried right now -- but in a week, maybe two weeks from now I haven't seen anything -- what's going on?"
Some people are happy to just move on from the situation.
"No delays. The planes were packed, but the stewardesses were perfect, the flight attendants good, the pilot was good - couldn't have asked for a better treatment. It was all good," said Dynwanda Earp, who flew in from Dallas on Friday. "I will fly Southwest again."
Others say they'll think twice before booking a Southwest flight again.
"I would think twice about booking with Southwest, to be honest, even though I've used them so much. I just hope they actually update their systems," Frugoli said. "Hopefully Southwest learns from this mistake and actually does something a little bit better moving on into 2023 and 2024."
