Southwest Apologizes To Employees With Bonus Points

Waste of money. Southwest's brand will recover without any goodwill payments or apology tours.

Yep… a “fare across America sale”, and the entire WN base will forget!

The US airline industry is an oligopoly with only a few major players and a few minor ones. WN is too big to be done in by this meltdown because there are simply few other options, and in many cases, WN is the only, or one of only two carriers operating a route. Even if many consumers wanted to avoid WN, they'd quickly change their tune when WN offers a better routing or cheaper flight. There's not really anywhere else to go.

The airline does need to take steps to regain trust with employees, but again the reality is that there aren't a lot of other options. Employees like the perks they get such as free travel. Pilots and FAs would have to start at the bottom at other airlines, for positions that are already extremely competitive. Frontline workers maybe have more options, but we're also entering a recession and seeing layoffs across many industries. So, I'm sure some might quit and change professions, but I think many employees are also stuck and management knows it.

With all the points gifting I revisited a past problem via Twitter. Previously I had been told that WN doesn't award goodwill RR points and I was told the same thing this time(though they've been doling out goodwill points like crazy). They did, however, give me a couple of $50 LUV vouchers...

I am not sure that this will even make them while again. Part of the memo regarding the huge expenses that they are going to incur noted that some of the expense will be offset by a reduction in profit sharing, so all of these people will lose their bonuses (looks like about $3-4,000 each) because of the clown show running the airline. $400 of funny money ain’t going to cut it.

That is a rather elementary financial impact analysis. It doesn’t cost SW anywhere close to $26.4M. They have partnerships with their SWAG vendors and the actual “cost” to SW is significantly less, and there’s various revenue share models built into them. You’re comparing apples to oranges.

I wonder if Biden's 80,000 IRS employees are gonna come after Southwest if these employees aren't issued 1099-MISC's? Union employees get a pass from Dems, right?

It's W2 income since they're employees.

Will the employees they terminated for not working in unsafe conditions on the ramp during the winter storm in Denver receive bonus points?

Of course, you just have to make every subject political just to pacify your hurt feelings about the GOP losing, right?....Get over it and dont ruin threads with your unwanted political remarks. And yes, I'm a Republican.

Why should they apologize to the Denver employees? There's nothing "cruel" (your words) about punishing those who don't show up to work. Having to cancel and delay flights in/out of Denver due to employees calling in "sick" most likely led to the nationwide meltdown a few days later.

Lame. Cash bonuses would have been a better gesture. This is just play money that they're forced to pay back to the company. Doling out points to customers is one thing, but giving to employees who just went through a pretty lousy week falls short.

That's so tacky and cheap Southwest!!! Would NEVER fly this Mickey Mouse operation!!

You’re a bit simple. The “brand” might recover, but loosing almost a billion dollars of revenue obviously effects profits and the longterm financial stability of the company. Southwest’s CEO should resign.

Half the people that make the airline fly are contractors. Guess what they get....

Last meltdown they gave employees a yeti tumbler, how about giving them a GREAT CONTRACT!

Exactly.... and they are many of the smaller locations where flight options less plentiful, so lots of telling people "Sorry, no flights out of here for a week!"

That's a good point which I think many have forgotten. I imagine the root cause is the combination of the two - too many employees calling in sick (allegedly faking sickness) in Denver combined with the antiquated IT system that didn't know where all the available human resources are located that could fill the gap.

@Ban

Was with you until the last sentence. Sadly, the CEO most responsible for this is now gone with a multi-million dollar golden parachute.

They haven't updated their shitty I.T. systems in a significant way since 2017 (most of us don't even have phones running on tech that old), but in that same amount of time: they thought it was a great idea to buy back more than $6Billion in stock, for their own personal benefit.

The current CEO had little/nothing to do with the cause, but was placed at the helm for the inevitable fallout. Not sure ousting him would serve any purpose but symbolism.

This is when you dive deeper and educate yourself on why these [implied lazy] employees are calling in sick in the first place, already with mediocre union contracts, and having to deal with, after reading your comment, certain types of passengers...

Make of it what you wish.

Or maybe WN could just fix the ancient, problematic software that staff have been complaining about for God knows how long.

I have more inside knowledge than anyone on this website, and staff have been complaining to upper management about the often unresponsive systems for several years—usually *dire* warnings (keep in mind, this is not Herb's airline anymore; those days are long over). Instead, management kept buying planes, adding routes and opening up bases...even while being spread thin due to their bungling of COVID.

I'm not going to pretend that this is an overnight fix, but WN is the 6th largest airline *in the world*. Quit counting beans and fix your stuff.