In This Article:
Southwest Airlines (LUV) experienced over 1,000 delays and cancelled over 100 flights due to poor weather over the holiday weekend. It's nothing like last year however, where millions of travelers were impacted when the airline suffered a massive meltdown due to weather and technical issues.
Yahoo Finance's Brad Smith and Jared Blikre discuss holiday travel and Southwest's meltdown last year. For more expert insight and the latest market action, click here to watch this full episode of Yahoo Finance Live.
Video Transcript
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- Some people saw their holiday travels disrupted yet again this year. Southwest Airlines saw over 1,000 delays and canceled flights over-- and canceled over 100 flights, I should say, this Christmas weekend, testing out new procedures that the company developed after the holiday mayhem last year. The airline cited the poor weather conditions, namely the fog that is plaguing the Midwest.
And more is yet to come this winter as the National Weather Service has now issued weather storm warnings in six states that could very well impact travelers as the season continues on. We should note that it was Southwest this time last year--
- I remember that.
- --that had gotten fined $140 million over their meltdown. Impacted roughly 17,000 holiday flights, 2 million passengers were impacted as a result of this. And so this just a year after what was already in the mind of, perhaps, a lot of travelers out there, hoping that this wouldn't happen again. And now we're seeing some of the disruptions rear their head again.