How Southwest can win back its angry, stranded customers

Southwest Airlines’ customers are furious about the company’s Christmas week service meltdown. But fliers may forgive the company sooner than you think. The airline is paying the price for canceling about half of its schedule between December 20 and December 29 – more than 16,700 flights during the busy holiday season – because of a combination of bad weather and an antiquated crew scheduling system. Southwest said that it lost about $350m in ticket sales for January and February because people have avoided bookings on the airline. No wonder: the holidays are perhaps the worst time of the year to strand customers. “It’s difficult to overstate how sour a taste this left in the hundreds of thousands of people at one of the most emotionally charged periods of the year,” said Scott Keyes, founder and chief flight expert for Going.com, a discount flight web site. “If it had happened in July, it’d be one thing. But they were the airline Grinch that stole Christmas,” said airline consultant Michael Boyd. Complicating Southwest’s recovery effort: Winter weather continues to batter the United States, and the airline (and its competitors) repeatedly canceled hundreds of flights a day last month. Even so, Boyd, Keyes and other experts expect Southwest will recover the overwhelming majority of its customer base, despite the aftereffects of the meltdown and flyers’ lingering anger.<br/>