March 29, 2024

Not So Jolly Christmas Chaos

Rehoboth Ramblings

Posted

What a Christmas it was for frazzled travelers, spending their holidays crammed into airports (for days!) while family celebrations went on without them. About the only positive thing about their ordeal is that they weren’t stuck outside in a blizzard in Buffalo.

It’s easy for me to talk, staying home and going no further than a day trip to good old Newport over the holidays. But I’ve had my own bad holiday travel experiences in the past and have the greatest sympathy for all who suffered this past December. I’m sure a number of people in our towns faced travel woes somewhere along the line.

Then there’s the Southwest Airlines horror story. When an airline tries to play catch up by cancelling 60% or more of their flights during the busiest time of the year, things are indeed in a bad way. While I knew that Southwest didn’t use the “hub and spoke” plan for scheduling their flights, I never really knew how that worked.

The Southwest model is called “point to point” which means planes fly from one city to another without returning to one or two main hubs. The advantage of the hub and spoke model is that airlines can shut down specific routes and have plans to restart operations when the weather improves. Meanwhile, bad weather can mess up multiple flights in the “point to point” system.

To make matters worse, Southwest apparently has outdated infrastructure for communicating with its passengers as well as with its employees, making you wonder how they’ve stayed in business. One frustrated traveler said he had to stay at the airport because the Southwest customer service line was disconnected and he couldn’t change his reservations online. This does not boost confidence in the airline, that’s for sure. And who knows where your luggage is or when you’ll finally locate it?

Has anyone done a survey yet asking how many people are now reconsidering using Southwest for future travels? If you’re going from Green in Rhode Island, Southwest has always been convenient. Whenever a flight attendant says upon arrival, “We know you have many choices when you fly” we always mutter, “No we don’t”. This is especially true if you’re trying to avoid the grueling trip to Logan, which always leaves me a wreck.

I’ve enjoyed a few flights on JetBlue in past years, but a couple were extremely late (like once arriving in Florida way past midnight, not my preferred choice). We enjoyed taking a direct flight from Providence to Columbus last summer on the new Breeze airline, on what apparently turned out to be a trial basis.

Now Breeze is saying they will again try for a long-awaited direct flight from Rhode Island to Los Angeles and also in the future will offer direct, though not daily, flights from Providence to both Columbus and Cincinnati, which are only two hours’ drive apart. This would be great but let’s wait and see.

But back to the winter weather conditions that caused all the travel chaos. The life-threatening (and life-taking) blizzard in western New York and other Northern locations was a truly horrifying multi-day event. Santa may live at the North Pole, but most people certainly don’t want to endure Arctic weather of this type. As we approach the 45th anniversary of “The Blizzard” of 1978 in New England, this reminds us that things could be much worse than that.

We spent most of the day without power at our house on December 23 after a falling tree took out a power line down the street. We were grateful both for the lack of snow and for our trusty generator, which you really need if you live in Rehoboth. Soggy ground, high winds, and old dead trees hanging over the power lines make for a recipe for power outages.

We are most grateful and express our appreciation to all those who help clear up after a severe weather event, such as the people from the power companies and the tree removal services, who brave awful weather to get us back to normal. I’d wish them a New Year where “all is calm” but that seems unlikely given the extreme weather of all types experienced all over the world these days. So I’ll just say Thank You and Happy New Year to all!

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