South"worst" - yet again it disappoints.
 

Against my better judgment I booked a round-trip flight on Southwest for my elderly mother for her visit with friends in Destin, Florida. Her itinerary included a connection in Baltimore.

To make a long story somewhat short, the Southworst website said her flight into Florida was on time, right up to the arrival, when in reality it had not taken off from Baltimore. When my mother's friends arrived at the airport for the pick-up, the monitors in the airport said "on time." The Southworst personnel had no idea what was going on. Finally my mom's friends were informed that the flight was 2 hours late.

No emails, no text messages, and an inaccurate flight status on the website. Unacceptable.

I pity the travelers who must rely on Southworst due to a lack of options, and I will endeavor to avoid it whenever possible in the future.

IMHO, if I stop flying on every airline that has provided poor customer service, I'll end up on the bus or a train.

Sorry - but I can count the number of bad (not terrible just bad-ish) experiences on Southwest on one hand . . . over decades of flying them.

I cannot say the same about almost any other airline

I've had airlines change schedules on me 4 times - on the same trip - w/o notification

So don't fly them - just gives a little better shot at group A >)

I agree with you, Gekko, that that is totally unacceptable. Have you tried to get some satisfaction for your trouble?

Southworst sent an email to me requesting feedback, and of course I let 'em have it. No response back.

Three weeks ago I had a noon Delta flight. At 8am I received both a text and email from Delta informing me that my flight would depart 50 minutes later than scheduled. And it did.

Last holiday season, JetBlue CALLED me to say my flight had been delayed 4 hours by weather.

And I've NEVER experienced such website incompetence as with this Southworst episode.

I would keep hammering Southwest. A friend of mine recently experienced terrible customer service on a flight and he ultimately got his ticket price refunded. He is a master negotiator, but the main thing is that he devoted himself to emailing and tweeting everyone he could find up to and including the CEO. Persistence pays.

I fly Southwest a lot, almost once a month. I have had few problems for the majority of time.

Just last week, I got a PHONE call from Southwest to inform me that a flight I have in mid November was changing its layover time. They wanted to know if that was ok and if not, what could they do to accomdate me.

I thought that was pretty great customer service. Emailed are usually the way most airlines inform you of changes.

Oh, she also said that IF I wanted to change flights, I would be able to do so, and not pay the going price , I'd get the new flight for same price.

No complaints from me.

I have flown Southwest for years, usually a couple times a year and have never had any of these problems. Rare have my flights been delayed, but when it happens the info is correct within some reasonable time frame.

I just read a recent poll of airline customer satisfaction in the news, and Southwest was one of the top airlines is customer satisfaction, so it can't be the "worst". If you don't like them, don't fly them, it's that simple. I don't fly airlines I don't like. I have many choices and choose Southwest a lot, so don't need your pity.

Here's a very recent article that says Southwest ranked well in customer satisfaction (which I think means comlaint rate) http://money.cnn.com/2015/08/11/news...ints-increase/

Here's the actual data from DOT's June report
https://www.transportation.gov/sites...AugustATCR.pdf

So it appears Spirit is the worst by about everything. Southwest isn't bad. If you look at the table 8A for pct of cancelled flights, which is interesting, SWA is about 7%, Spirit is 40% (yikes) and United is about 11%. Delta is very good on that score, actually. Table 6 on page 44 shows SWA is 4th best in overall complaint rate for June 2015 alone, only Alaska and 2 smaller local routes are better (Skywest and Expressjet). Table 5 on page 50 shows SWA as best in complaint rate (must be some other measure) over Jan-June 2015.

That report can be useful to see airports to avoid if possible, etc.