Southwest is the best

I have never really had an opinion about which airline I took to get me to my destination. I like the purple silverware on Hawaiian Air (and the fact that I was going to Hawaii), the direct Delta flight from SLC to Sacramento was nice, but in the end, they all got me where I was going. I was a bit irritated when Southwest switched from honey roasted to salted peanuts (ok, I'm still irritated about that) but now that most of my flights are longer than SLC to Sacramento or San Diego, I usually get a bag of crackers or something different anyway. Ok, the purpose of this post is not to debate airline snacks so I'll get on with it.

Over Christmas break, Grant and I flew American Airlines to San Diego and back. We had no problems on the way there, our return flight was through St. Louis which we were excited about because several other airports were having weather problems. As we got on the plane, the woman scanning our tickets said, "Count your blessings, this is the second on time flight out of this airport today." I was feeling confident, got on the plane with a short flight to go, sat down and opened my book. After a while of sitting there, the pilot came on and said, "My co-pilot has been delayed on another flight, he should be here in about 15 minutes and then we will take off." I thought, no big deal, we'll make it home tonight and we'll be good to go. Thirty minutes later the pilot gets on again and says that the co-pilot was "timed out" and could not legally fly any longer (even though this was only about a 1.5 hour flight), and they had decided to cancel our flight! I had never been on a cancelled flight but there we were, stuck in STL at 11pm, and they told us that they couldn't get us out of there for 2 days, yet weren't willing to pay for anything!!! Ridiculous. So, we rented a car with a random Russian couple that was also on our canceled flight and drove the 5 hours back to Kentucky. American reimbursed us $60 (yeah, pretty much an insult considering our flights were each like $400!)

Now contrast that to the trip I just took. We had an ice storm hit Kentucky the day before I was supposed to fly out to Utah. We had to leave at 3:30 am to get to the airport on time. It was snowing, there was ice, trees had fallen in the road, etc. So you get the picture, the weather was not favorable for a flight. I was on Southwest, I checked before I left, the flight was on time, etc. I got on the plane, ready to take off but sat on the runway for 3 hours while getting de-iced.
They would finish one side and by the time they finished the other we had ice on the first side again. I obviously was not excited about this as I would then have to get a new connecting flight in Chicago, but the flight attendants were good about letting us know when the next flights were leaving out of there, and I got on another flight just a few hours after arriving in Chicago. It took me about 7 extra hours to get to Utah but all in all I was just glad that I made it judging from the conditions we were leaving in.

I didn't complain to them, was sad I missed out on some Lindsay time, but again was just happy to have made it. I received a letter in the mail the other day from Southwest. I figured it was them trying to get me to sign up for their credit card, take a survey, etc. To my pleasant surprise I opened it and it read, "While trying to explain the impact the weather has on our operation may be informative to some, it will likely come across as a feeble excuse to others. With this in mind, two things are certain, the overall inconvenience caused by the delay of your flight's departuyre from Louisville on January 28 was frustrating for everyone involved and we wholeheartedly apologize for that." I read further and on the attached page was a $100 voucher towards another Southwest flight that just has to be used sometime in the next year and a half. Given that my entire round trip flight was only $150, the $100 voucher more than compensated me for the extra reading time I had on the runway that day.

I just thought it was a nice gesture by the company, and I have always felt that it is nice to reward people when they don't complain. I struggled with always doing favors for the complainers when I worked at Raintree and made it a goal to reward the nice quiet people who were also inconvenienced once in awhile. Thanks Southwest :)

PS- Sorry for a really long post with no real pictures, not usually my style. I promise to make up for it soon.