Discussion for article #225478
Airlines are joyless enterprises at best, and I’ve never found Southwest to be any more enjoyable than more conventional cattle carriers. I’ll be more even more suspicious of them in the future.
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Corporations are people. People are incompetent. Therefore corporations are incompetent. (See Southwest, Verizon, etc.)
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Did he re-post his tweet after they landed?
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Sounds kinda fishy.
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This can’t be right. Corporations are blameless, holy creatures.
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Do we have the actual tweet? Because if it said something like “I want to punch those %^#$^#'s lights out” the airline might have a shred of an excuse.
But if it did say something like that, just deleting wouldn’t be good enough. (Also have to wonder: do airlines follow all their passengers on twitter, or did he tell them about it?)
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. . . thereby proving his point.
And imagine if guns were involved.
Anyone who flies SWA knows that they have family boarding (between Groups A and B) precisely for this situation. No, kids do not get to upgrade to your boarding position because they’re kids.
Fair enough. However that does not excuse kicking people off the plane until they remove tweets you don’t like.
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That’s what I wondered - because if SW or any company has that kind of instantaneous social media monitoring and response, we’re in worse trouble than we know.
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I had perhaps my most epic nightmare travel story because of SouthWest.
I landed in Phoenix on a day that someone got stopped trying to bring a gun through the security checkpoint (pre 9/11), and grabbed her bag and took off INTO the terminal. So they had to empty the terminal and all the planes (never found the woman with the gun). So needless to say when I arrived, anything resembling flight plans was out the window.
I was experienced at air travel by this time, so I didn’t stress out. 12 hours later, at the end of the night, they finally started boarding my plane (after 5 gate changes). While waiting for the arriving passengers to deplane, a flight attendant singled me out and said my bag wouldnt fit in the overhead (it would, and did on the same airplane…I packed light specifically so I never had to check my bag), and told me to they would take it, but probably wouldnt get it on this plane, so I could pick it up tomorrow morning at Denver.
I of course, disagreed with her, while being polite. She then turned around to the entire crowd (who had also been waiting 12ish hours )and told them nobody could board because I was “giving her a hard time”. I took issue with that, and requested she call over her manager. She refused. I think asked for her name to report her to management (she wasnt wearing her name badge). She refused again. She informed me that she was having a bad day. I politely said I understood as I was having a bad day too. But the difference between us was…I was PAYING to have a bad day, while she was being paid for hers. Then she started getting nasty and said I was obviuosly a small man trying to compensate for something and called for security.
Needless to say, that set me over the edge. I ended up not getting on the plane (the rest of the story for that night is almost another tale) and took another flight out on United the next day. (Missing my appointments and some pretty important meetings).
Ironically, after finishing that trip and getting back to San Fran, my company booked me a flight back to Atlanta…right through Phoenix and on SW yet again. The final straw for me was on that flight they were charging $4 to watch Goldfinger of all things. Goldfinger was playing that night on TBS for free…
I think there’s little doubt this guy was a complete asshole, and something sounds fishy about the story. I mean, how did Southwest even know what he had tweeted or whether he had removed it? I don’t think anybody would suggest Southwest is monitoring the social media accounts of all its passengers in real time, so at the least he was waving it under their noses. And no, being an A-list passenger does not extend to other people you fly with. So basically he was acting like an entitled child, and we should be skeptical of anything he says.
Of course that doesn’t rule out a Southwest employee acting inappropriately as well. That’s what investigations are for, though. I don’t think it’s fair to assume this is some kind of systemic problem at Southwest Airlines or something to get upset about though.
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No one has ever been rude to me on Southwest, which was why I used them every year to go to conferences.They were the only airline that didn’t give me attitude.
Now I might have to rethink.
Who pays four bucks to see the cut-down and censored movie cuts the airlines show?
Some of them are so bad, the directors have had their names removed and replaced with the shame name, “Alan Smithee.”
so the corporate person (southwest) determines the degree to which the non-corporate person can exercise free speech
just as the founders intended. thanks conservatives
Seriously? You’ve always had good experiences with a company, but because one customer allegedly had a bad experience you’re going to rethink who you do business with?
I guarantee you there has never been a single airline, or any business, in history that did not have one dissatisfied customer. You don’t even know how much of this guy’s story, if any, is true.
Overreact much?
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What’s a couple of kids more or less to the bleeding Southwest Airlines? Just another case of someone with a tiny bit of power and a whole lot of insecurities overusing the former.
eh, seems like the internet has their cape on to defend this guy but he sounds kind of like an entitled douche (he couldn’t have waited for the flight to land before complaining to customer service? They also have a whole section on their website specifically for that). Then in response the Southwest employees in Denver (i.e., not necessarily the entire company) gave a ham-fisted response/overreaction that made them look worse. In any case it seems like not all of the details are there anyway.
I don’t get all the “I’m never flying Southwest again!” type responses, especially since they tried to take responsibility for it the same way any large corporation with thousands of employee does. It could’ve been any other airline it happened to.