Southwest Airlines
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Southwest doesn't value their customers like I thought they did
To summarize: - A delay turned into a cancellation that should have just been a cancellation from the beginning. - Houston Southwest Hub is TERRIBLE!! (Even though their customer service was trying, the Southwest policies were just making it impossible to really help) - My LUGGAGE was SOPPING WET including everything that was inside of it! (thank God I was going to visit family and not going somewhere else but that was not the case for other people) -All in all, this was the worst experience with Southwest that I've ever had and for them to only give us a useless Hotel voucher for the evening was just Disrespectful and showed me they really don't care about their customers. Let me explain why. We traveled from Belize to St. Louis but had a layover in Houston. I normally never have any issues with Southwest; they're my go-to, but after this flight, I can NEVER travel through Houston and won't always look to Southwest as my number one. Our layover from Belize was four hours and the flight was a red-eye so we got food and relaxed for a little while we waited. As we got closer to boarding, a storm rolled through and diverted the plane to New Orleans. Not a problem at all since I hate flying when it's just cloudy. Once the storm cleared, the ticketing counter kept us updated on the re-boarding in New Orleans, the wheels being up, and them being halfway through the trip. My issue came when the flight, about 20 minutes to landing in Houston to take us back to St. Louis was suddenly canceled. At this point, it's 1 am and everyone is confused and outraged because the sky is clear. We then find out, the flight crew ran out of flying hours. Seriously!? So, throughout this entire ordeal, which took about 3- 4 hours after the initial boarding time, NO ONE calculated their flight hours until they were getting ready to land?! The icing on the cake was the rebooked flights for layover trips through Dallas to St. Louis the next morning and the hotel voucher that was basically useless! I mean seriously, it's 2 am by this time and we have to be on a flight in literally 4 hours?! In what world does leaving the airport and going to the hotel make any type of sense? We were put on a standby list for the flight that was direct to St. Louis at 5:35 am that morning and because we were in the middle of a connection, we were told we were top priority and pushed above the others who weren't in the middle of a connection. Well, that was also FALSE! If someone had A+ preferred, we were pushed down the list after them even though they weren't in the middle of a connection. The worst part is that after the horrible experience was over and we were finally in St. Louis to collect our bags, EVERYTHING WAS SOAKING WET! Essentially, it seems like during the storm, our bags were left outside unprotected and soaked by the rain. Why in the world would they leave them exposed like that? Everything smelled like mildew and was still wet, so I had to wash the entire contents of our bag and lay the electronics out to dry. Thankfully we had our laptops, but our firestick, chargers, and other things were in there. That alone really pissed me off. I just wanted to shower and change clothes and rest after 24+ hours of DOMESTIC travel that should have only been 12. But no, I had to do Laundry before I did anything else because I had nothing to change into!