Southwest Expects to 'Perform Normally' Monday

Southwest Airlines on reported early Monday that it expected the technical systems that power its customer service to “perform normally” after “teams worked throughout the night in advance of our first departures to ensure the smoothest operation of our originating and later flights.”

It is still recommended that customer show up two hours earlier than their departure time. 

In a statement released on the Southwest website at 6 a.m. Pacific Standard Time, the company said, “We have some additional work to do to get bags delivered and some delayed or displaced customers into open seats today. We have teams working as quickly as possible to accomplish that. The flexibility we extended our traveling Customers on Sunday continues throughout Monday and that will allow those travel plans scheduled for Sunday or Monday to change their plans at Southwest.com.”

Late Sunday night, Southwest urged travelers with morning flights to use the carrier’s online check-in service and print out boarding passes before arriving at LAX following a weekend nationwide computer failure that delayed hundreds of flights. The airline also asked customers checking baggage to print bag tags at a self-service kiosk near the ticket counter and present identification to Southwest employees.

“We thank our employees for their tireless efforts to take care of our customers and we appreciate our customers’ patience as we work toward a solution,” the airline said in a statement.

Despite the glitch, Southwest reported that among its 3,355 daily flights scheduled on Sunday, it operated with 75 percent on-time performance. There were “approximately 836 delayed flights.””

“It’s never too early to say thank you and to extend our apologies and we want to share those sentiments both with our hard-working Employees and our loyal and understanding Customers, whom we hope to welcome back for a better experience soon,” Southwest continued in the statement. “We’ll continue to work individually with our affected Customers to make this right.‎”

Customers stuck in long lines waited in the heat at Los Angeles International Airport and at other fields across the nation Sunday as a nationwide computer failure prompted agents to issue handwritten tickets for departing flights. The airline asked that all U.S. passengers arrive at least two hours ahead of their scheduled departures today.

LAX police tweeted out a photo of a huge line in Terminal 1 Sunday as passengers tried to make morning flights. By 6:30 p.m. Los Angeles time, about 450 Southwest flights nationwide had been delayed, a Southwest spokeswoman in Texas told City News Service. The airline operates 3,600 scheduled flights per day.

The airline blamed the delays on “technology issues, which are requiring us to process customers on their individual itineraries.”

The airline was continuing to use backup systems to check-in passengers who arrived at airports without printed or mobile boarding passes, according to a statement.

Southwest is one of the busiest carriers at airports in Los Angeles, Burbank, Orange County and San Diego.

-City News Service and Martin Henderson; lines at LAX via LAX Police tweet; Southwest Airlines via Wikimedia Commons.