Just how crazy is trying to book a flight this week, thanks to the chaos caused by Southwest Airlines thousands of cancellations?
How does $800 from Chicago to San Jose sound? Need to get back to the Bay Area from Phoenix on Thursday? The cheapest ticket is $418 — but you’ll have to spend more than 4 hours waiting for a connection at Paine Field in Everett, Washington.
It doesn’t matter where you’re going or on which airline: Airfares and routes are setting a new definition for mind-blowing and nonsensical.
A last-minute traveler can usually book a flight from Los Angeles to San Francisco for under $100, and Southwest was one of the main carriers along that route. But as of Wednesday afternoon, if you needed to fly to the Bay Area from the L.A. area before Jan. 1, one-way tickets would cost anywhere between $350 and $700 for the cheapest options. And that’s even with some airlines, such as United and American, announcing price caps to help stranded Southwest customers on many of the most-impacted routes.
Prices should start to drop over the weekend and come way down next week if Southwest’s operations get back to normal, experts say. In the meantime, the cheapest flight Thursday from Phoenix to Las Vegas is going for … this is not a typo … $999 on United. On most days in January, discount airlines Spirit and Frontier are offering a bare-bones version of that trip for less than $20.
If you are trying to get back to the Bay Area from the major East Coast metropolitan areas such as Washington, D.C., and New York, tickets this weekend are ranging from $359 to over $600 for a one-way fare, and well over $900 if you need to fly before Saturday.
Kathleen Bangs, a former airline pilot and spokesperson for the flight-tracking company FlightAware, has some advice if you can’t wait for Southwest to rebook you in the New Year and have to choose a different airline. “Find alternate transportation, take pictures of everything, keep receipts, and then submit it” to Southwest.
“The irony is that Southwest is known for their excellent customer service” said Bangs. She does expect the airlines to honor reasonable requests for reimbursement caused by non-weather delays, as the CEO has promised, but she noted that consumers can also submit their complaints and documentation to the Department of Transportation online now.
Some Bay Area airports such as Oakland and San Jose have a higher proportion of Southwest flights than other airports and were disproportionately affected by the cancellations. On Tuesday, San Jose and Sacramento airports both had more than a third of their flights canceled. On Wednesday San Jose had 73 cancellations, 32% of flights, Oakland had 63 cancellations, 22% of incoming flights, and Sacramento had the highest in the country at 39%, with 72 cancellations.
But the Bay Area is far from the only place experiencing sticker shock. Flights from Pittsburgh to Washington, D.C., normally a 1-hour direct flight, are nearly impossible to find for Thursday or Friday, with every available option on the travel website Kayak as of Wednesday afternoon costing over $1,000, even with an 11-hour layover in Chicago, several hundred miles in the wrong direction. Driving the same distance would take just 4-5 hours. And other stories of exorbitantly expensive flights and irrational itineraries are easy to find as the dust settles.
Erin Stumpf and her husband were headed from Los Angeles back to Sacramento on Dec. 23 when their flights were “delayed, delayed again, canceled, uncanceled and reinstated, then canceled again.” They rebooked at the smaller nearby Burbank airport only to make their way there and find that flight also was canceled. They had to stay in a hotel and finally rented a car and drove to Sacramento.
“My husband and I are fortunate to be able to afford an unexpected $501 expense,” she said, adding up the cost of the Lyft, hotel and car rental they had to make, “and I am not optimistic we will recoup that.”
“I’m sure for many travelers that’d be a huge hardship,” she said, “especially this time of year.”
While weather was the first domino, certain trends in air travel overall and Southwest in particular have added to the chaos. Bangs says more people are flying now than before the pandemic but on fewer planes. This has to do with pilot shortages and other changes that have left less wiggle room to accommodate delays, cancellations and extra passengers.
With fewer empty seats, there is less wiggle room when things go wrong. It has taken longer for stranded Southwest passengers to get the available seats on other airlines, pushing prices even higher than last-minute holiday travel usually is.
Tell us how much you had to pay and how crazy your route home was from being stranded by Southwest.
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