‘SNL’ prompts Southwest Airlines to cancel holiday flights
“Saturday Night Live” joins many vacationers’ favorite pastime in 2022: hating on Southwest Airlines.
“During the holiday season, we messed around,” said Heidi Gardner, who played a Southwest employee on this week’s episode of the NBC sketch comedy show, as did Michael B. Jordan, Devon Walker and others. “Our system collapsed and thousands of flyers were left stranded. And you understandably yelled at us for days, even more than you usually do.”
But never fear. On “SNL,” Southwest vowed to make changes to provide a “better, more modern Southwest experience.”[ads1];
“For starters, we’re finally upgrading our entire communications system to 2008 Dell computers,” Gardner said — a step up from the airline’s 2002 ThinkPad laptops.
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The sketch also included jokes that the airline will create a new premiere lounge by holding two or three tables at an airport Starbucks and will keep track of air traffic with computers instead of pen and paper.
Southwest will also sort bags by color to prevent bags from getting lost. For example, all red bags will go to Dallas and blue to Charlotte, North Carolina. This also makes bag sorting the passengers’ responsibility.
“Here at Southwest, mistakes were made, and it’s mostly on us. But some of it is on you,” Gardner said. “Again, you bought a Southwest ticket. You obviously don’t respect yourself, so why should we?”
Southwest reported a loss of $220 million after taking $800 million from canceling about 16,700 flights in the last 10 days of December, according to airline executives during the company’s fourth-quarter earnings call Thursday.
The Transportation Department is investigating whether Southwest scheduled more flights than it could realistically expect to handle, which it says would violate federal laws against deceptive trade practices. Southwest says the schedule was “thoughtfully designed” and that the airline had plenty of staff.
Contributors: David Koenig and Michelle Chapman, The Associated Press
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