The bill is salty for Southwest Airlines, one of America’s major domestic carriers.
The operator has just indicated that it would lose between 725 and 825 million dollars in the fourth quarter of 2022 after the episode of extreme cold that devastated the country at the end of December.
Specifically, the company says it lost $425 million in revenue after more than 16,700 flights were canceled due to this unprecedented weather event.
The rest is made up of higher operating expenses, the cost of refunds to customers affected by the mess, and additional bonuses and compensation for employees.
Southwest Airlines also pays the expenses of a nefarious organization during the crisis, a mess denounced at the highest level of the State.
$425 million in lost revenue
In fact, Southwest was affected far more than other US airlines during this blizzard of the century.
For the unions, the failures are the result of a combination of a more dispersed network of lines than that of other large US companies and an outdated employee assignment system.
In these conditions, the crews are sometimes “in the wrong place, without a plane,” the vice president of the company’s pilots union, Mike Santoro, told CNN.
The management has apologized for a situation that it describes as “unacceptable”. “We were fully staffed and prepared” as the holiday weekend approached, Southwest says on its website.
“We are moving quickly processing tens of thousands of refunds per day and we won’t stop until we respond to every affected customer,” the group’s head, Bob Jordan, said in a statement on Thursday.
He also assured that the vast majority of lost luggage had been returned to its owners or was in the process of being returned.
Source: BFM TV
