That was frustrating, of course, and it got me thinking about ways to improve the customer experience in weather disruptions. (I’m not talking about onboard delays, though that was on the news this past weekend.) Most of my ideas would never fly, but there was one that I think makes sense: the retroactive refund.

I don’t want to single out US Airways, because they all have similar policies. When a weather event like this becomes a possibility, airlines issue a weather waiver, which is basically a one-size-fits-all policy that is just about worthless for a large chunk of travelers. The weather waiver nearly always says the same thing.

• If you are scheduled to travel on a day that is expected to be impacted by bad weather, you can change your flight without penalty to a day or two before or after your scheduled flight as long as you keep the same departure and arrival cities.
• If your flight is canceled (as with any flight that’s canceled), you can get a refund.

Some airlines extend the change period up to a couple weeks at times, but the problem is the same. This is completely useless for people who are either attending a specific event or people who don’t have a flexible schedule. For them, they either go as planned or they don’t go at all, so the waiver never applies.

It gets really tricky when there are other aspects to the trip involved. Maybe the hotel has a 2 day cancellation policy. Maybe you need to give more notice to people you’re meeting with. Maybe you need to make alternate plans with adequate notice. There is a lot at stake, and when the airlines grind you down to the last minute, it can be a real problem.

For some people, it becomes a gambling issue. If it looks like the weather is going to scuttle your flight but the airline hasn’t canceled it yet, you have to make a decision. Do you cancel the hotel to avoid a penalty and then just eat the $150 change fee on the plane ticket? Or do you wait until the flight cancels and hope the hotel will be forgiving? Some might say that people should just wait because they don’t know if the flight will even cancel at all. That makes sense in a vacuum but with so many moving parts, it can often make sense in a situation like this to just scrap the existing plan and make alternate arrangements.

But for people on a budget, it’s worth trying to see if the flight will cancel in order to get a refund instead of throwing $150 down the drain. That means they sit on seats they don’t plan on using, just hoping to get their money back. Can the airlines improve on this?

We all know how the airlines think. It’s all about revenue. The airlines don’t want to give up any revenue that they already have, so they aren’t going to let people off easy. They’ve created a system that effectively traps travelers until the flight is canceled, and I can’t really blame them for doing it. I do, however, think the retroactive refund would help.

This doesn’t solve every problem, but it’s the only way I can see to make things better for travelers without having a largely negative impact on the airline’s revenue. (And we know that if it’s revenue-negative, the airlines won’t even consider it, even if it makes good sense from a customer service perspective.) Here’s how I envision it working.

• When a major weather event is predicted, airlines continue to issue a weather waiver as they do today. If people do have flexible travel plans and can take advantage of the offer to change by a couple of days, then that’s great.
• For those who aren’t helped by that, they can still just walk away and pay the $150 change fee BUT if the flight does cancel at a later date because of that weather issue, then the airline will give them the refund that they would have had if they had waited.

The customer benefit is obvious. If the customer sees a hurricane bearing down on his destination, he can cancel his ticket knowing that if the flight does cancel, he’ll still get that refund that he would have just waited around for nervously all week. If the hurricane goes a different way and the flight operates, well, then it’s a gamble that lost and the traveler is out $150. But that’s ok because it still gave him the flexibility to make the decision earlier on his own time without leaving anything on the table.

Now, the harder part to quantify is the benefit for the airline. Only those with access to airline data could really figure out how this looks from a dollar perspective, but there are very clear potential benefits.

Those people who would have paid the $150 fee to make a change might now get a refund instead, and that’s a loss. But there is also a potential for gain. Those who sat around waiting for the flight to cancel are probably squatting on seats they might not use anyway. They just don’t want to pay the change fee so they hope it cancels. These people would now cancel early, freeing up a seat that can be re-sold or used to reaccommodate passengers if the flight operates. If it doesn’t operate, then at least the person will already be removed from the system. One less person who needs immediate help when the reservations group is probably feeling overloaded.

This doesn’t solve every problem but it would help. Any other ideas out there on how to make this process better for travelers?

The New Boeing 787 – Right This Minute
This was a video interview about the 787. It was chopped up into a short segment so some of things are a little out of context, but it was fun to do.

In the Trenches: Sweating the Small Stuff – Intuit Small Business Blog
I naturally worry when things go wrong, even if minor. That’s just not a good way to be as we keep growing.

In the Trenches: To Train or Not To Train? – Intuit Small Business Blog
Finding someone who can really use a GDS is a tough thing to do.

American was surprisingly talkative on this issue, and I received a detailed explanation from spokesperson Tim Smith at the airline. The problem, of course, was weather. The morning started off with calm winds but fog and low clouds lasted until almost 10a. Visibility was down to 0.2 miles, and that was the first problem. It started to lift, but then the thunderstorms hit. They lasted on and off through the mid-afternoon.

When lightning gets near an airport, they close down the ramp and make everyone go into a safe location. It’s never a good idea to have people out on the ramp, risking a lightning strike. You also never want to be doing something like fueling an airplane when lightning is around, so delays mount quickly. That happened three separate times on May 29, and each stoppage lasted for about 40 minutes. That put operations at the airport in complete disarray.

As you would expect, the airlines started canceling a number of flights to try to prevent total gridlock. American Eagle alone canceled 126 flights through early afternoon with the forecast showing that weather would improve by around 1p. It didn’t. This is when it got ugly.

As the weather cleared around 3p, more flights started coming in to Chicago, but American Eagle had no gates available because it couldn’t get airplanes to depart fast enough. With its crews scattered around in the wrong places and other departing flights delayed longer than expected, the flights that came in had no place to park. That meant that 14 flights sat on the tarmac for more than 3 hours. (American actually says 15 flights, but the DOT only shows 14.) The longest was for 3 hour and 45 minutes, but the average for those flights was 3 hours and 18 minutes.

The good news is that Eagle was prepared with snacks, water, and working lavs on all the airplanes. That’s the part of the tarmac delay rule that makes a lot of sense to me, and I’m glad it’s there. But you still had a lot of people onboard for a long time. What else could have been done?

Well, American Eagle could have canceled more flights before they came into Chicago. Had the forecast been more accurate, maybe that would have been the case, but weather is unpredictable. Then again, if those inbound flights had been canceled, there would have been many more problems. All those people going into Chicago on would have been stuck where they started instead of getting to their destination with a 3 hour ground delay. With Memorial Day being the next day, it’s unlikely they would have been able to find seats on another flight for some time.

Beyond that, those flights had crews on them that needed to operate other flights out of Chicago. So if those canceled, then a slew of flights leaving Chicago would have been canceled as well. It’s likely that with those airplanes having to come right back to Chicago after that, those flights would have been canceled as well. It would have snowballed, and that’s why airlines only cancel flights when they have to in situations like these. American thought it had planned correctly, but it made a mistake.

I know what you’re thinking. Why not just let everyone off the airplane on buses if there are no gates? American had this to say:

Options for deplaning customers on a pad or other remote location at ORD are very limited. The possibility of deplaning customers on the taxiway and busing them back to the terminal was considered, but rejected on the basis of safety concerns. There was a great deal of activity and congestion on the ramp and we did not want to take that risk.

That was probably smart. Maybe instead of a new runway, O’Hare should simply focus on building some new ramp space where airplanes can park and unload people in situations like this.

In the end, with the tarmac delay rule in place, American probably would have just canceled more flights in advance had it had a more accurate weather report. I bet that’s what United did that day. But would that have really been better for everyone on those flights? That’s a whole different question.

[Original photos via Flickr users ColumbusCameraOp and SmokingPermitted - "Cosa sono? La bambina dei no"/CC 2.0]

Airline Geeks Episode 151 – Airplane Geeks Podcast
I love being a guest on the Airplane Geeks, because we get to sit around and, well, geek out about airlines. Tune in every week for geeky goodness, but this week you get to hear me. (Be warned, this isn’t a short podcast. Take it with you on your long commute.) I think the most interesting discussion involving me starts around the 32 minute mark.

In the Trenches: Should There Be an App for That? – Intuit Small Business Blog
I keep trying to figure out whether I need to create a Cranky Concierge app. I’m not going to just dive right in like others – I’m trying to figure out if I can make something truly useful. (And if anyone is a app developer for Android/iPhone/Blackberry, please let me know.)

In the Trenches: New Pricing Goes Into Effect – Intuit Small Business Blog
Just wrapping up on our new pricing finally going into effect.

You can see more on what Southwest did wrong on BNET, where I wrote about Southwest’s Rapid Rewards transition, airport systems failures, and the meltdown that followed. (This, by the way, is my very last week writing for BNET after 3 years on the job.) Southwest said it didn’t want to proactively communicate more than it did because it didn’t want to overburden its website which was already having problems.

Alaska may not have had website problems to muddy the waters, but its decision to go forward with very proactive communication is something that I imagine would have been the case regardless. The airline was doing a backup power supply upgrade when a transformer “blew” and the systems went down. This happened about 3am on Saturday. There were significant delays for flights at that point, and cancellations soon start piling on – about 150 or so in total. At 802a, Alaska sent its first tweet on the situation.

If I have one complaint, I would have liked to have seen a tweet show up earlier. But after that first tweet, the airline’s Twitter account went into overdrive with 11 separate tweets giving status updates, links to more information, and of course apologies. (This doesn’t include tweets that were sent in response to concerns of others.) Certainly Twitter wasn’t the only place where the airline was active. There were also 7 separate Facebook page updates dealing with the problems and four press releases.

Most importantly, I think, there was a big travel advisory placed in orange at the top of the page with a link to more information about the outage. At the same time, Alaska decided to loosen its change policy so that anyone traveling Saturday through today could make a change without a change fee. It was noted that hold times were long on the phones, but customers could also make those changes on the website.

By noon, the systems were at least partially working but delays persisted, of course. By yesterday, nearly everything was back to normal. And that’s when Alaska got even better. Alaska President Brad Tilden and regional subsidiary Horizon Air President Glenn Johnson put a 2m29s video on YouTube apologizing for everything and giving detailed information on what happened along with how people could still get help. It put a very welcome human face on the problem.

As noted in the video, the airline is encouraging anyone who had problems to contact the airline’s customer care group for what I assume is further compensation. At the very least, a personal apology will be issued. This was reinforced on the Facebook page and with a tweet:

For those customers that were impacted by yesterday’s flt disruption, pls contact us so we may follow-up individually: http://bit.ly/hBbGpr

In the end, there were plenty of angry people, without question. People were delayed and canceled and there will undoubtedly be some horror stories that circulate around this, but sh*t happens. It’s all about how the airline deals with its customers when it does happen, and Alaska did a fantastic job in this case.

The most interesting thing about the discussion was that airlines actually came prepared with hard numbers, something I’ve wanted to see for a long time. Unfortunately, the DOT’s representative disregarded them with “I don’t know where those numbers come from.” Let me explain in greater detail.

There were five of us on the panel. The other four were:

• Sam Podberesky- Assistant General Counsel for Aviation Enforcement and Proceedings, DOT
• Charlie Leocha – Director, Consumer Travel Alliance
• Denis Barrett – Director, Operations Control, US Airways
• Leila Lahbabi – Airport Attorney, Charlotte Douglas International Airport

Sam brought the DOT’s basic stance that there were no additional cancellations in 2010 as compared to the previous year, so the rule was great because it killed tarmac delays. That was the argument he used throughout the panel.

I began to argue that a simple year-over-year comparison means nothing because there are far too many other factors, like weather and operational changes, but I was interrupted by Sam to repeat his basic argument for the first of many times.

This is where it got interesting. Denis brought numbers with him regarding the number of flights canceled by US Airways since the implementation of the rule, something that I’ve been hoping to see for ages. He said that including US Airways Express, there have been 927 flights forced to return to the gate because of the three hour rule. Of those 318 canceled.

Those cancellations inconvenienced 16,000 passengers but that wasn’t all. Those airplanes were needed elsewhere after those flights and that meant further flights had to cancel. Another 12,000 people were impacted because of that.

What’s the most interesting stat here? On those 927 flights that returned to the gate, no more than 20 people elected to get off. So even the flights that did eventually go had to take delays just to return to the gate, often without a single person deciding to get off. We’re talking thousands and thousands of impacted passengers here. And that’s just US Airways.

When Sam repeated his original argument, someone from Delta stood up in the audience and said that they also had seen cancellations from this. Delta saw 279 airplanes return to the gate and 88 cancel, but that didn’t include Delta Connection.

Add this to comments made by American’s SVP of Government Affairs Will Ris in an earlier panel that the airline had definitely been forced to cancel more flights because of the rule, and the result seems clear. There has been a serious impact on passengers, and not in a good way.

Charlie jumped in and suggested that the airlines would just need some time to adapt to the rule and that within 18 months, they’d figure it out. The airlines didn’t seem convinced.

I tried to interject once again and say that year-over-year comparisons are not valid. What really matters is comparing what would have happened this year had the rule not been in place, and the airlines are clearly showing that cancellations would have been lower without the rule. Sam clearly didn’t agree.

How could we have two people sitting on the same stage seeing the complete opposite results? I suggested that maybe the DOT and airlines needed to get together to create a reporting standard since clearly that hasn’t happened.

Sam first suggested that it would be technically difficult because some of those flights that airlines reported as canceled would have canceled anyway, but that’s the reason I suggested getting together to create an acceptable standard. He then shrugged it off and sarcastically said, “I’m sure the airlines want to give more data.”

I proposed that the airlines would be happy to give data if it enabled them to help tweak the rule, but that seemed to fall on deaf ears. And that was that.

So where did this leave us? The DOT still says there has been no impact on cancellations (or at least very minimal impact), but Sam did give a little lip service to the problem at the end by saying “whether [the rule is] creating other issues is something we’ll have to look at.”

In the meantime, cancellations continue to mount, if you accept the airline interpretation of the data. And more people end up being inconvenienced than need to be. Hopefully one of these days, the DOT will come around and decide to see how it can really improve the rule instead of just arguing that it hasn’t had a negative impact.

In the end, the three people we followed were all able to get to their destinations thanks to a little bit of creativity. Each of these stories seems to have a good lesson for anyone who gets stuck in weather and needs to try to find an alternate route. So I thought I would go through each to display lessons learned.

Lesson #1 – Always Look at Alternate Airports
One client was flying from Chicago to Northwest Arkansas for an important meeting with that big box retailed based down there. Both United and American fly the route, and this time he was on United. His flight was canceled relatively early and so was almost every other flight to Northwest Arkansas that day. There was at least one morning flight that did go, but it was too early for him to make.

We looked at connections through other airports, but we couldn’t get to the other airports from Chicago, so that wasn’t an option. We ended up finding an option to Springfield, Missouri at 6p that was still showing is going so we consider that since it was less than 100 miles away. In the end, the client decided to go to Tulsa instead which is also less than 100 miles. Several flights to Tulsa had been canceled that day, but I had a hunch this one would go. It was the last flight of the night heading into a major maintenance facility. My guess was that airplane needed to be in Tulsa. (Any American people know the answer?)

The client was doubly lucky because he had American miles that he was able to use to go to Tulsa. To make things even better, there were Saver seats available for only 12,500 miles to get down there. So, we found him a car rental and his flight made it down there without incident.

Remember, always look for alternate airports.

Lesson #2 – Don’t Trust the Airline to Find the Best Alternate
Another client was traveling from Ottawa to Boston. There’s one flight a day on Air Canada and that flight was canceled, so what did Air Canada do? The airline automatically rebooked him on the next nonstop flight available to Boston, which happened to be the next day. That wasn’t going to work, so we went online to find that there were plenty of options connecting through Montréal or Toronto. The system simply didn’t look at that as a possibility.

In the end we sat on interminable hold with Air Canada trying to find the best option to get him to where he needed to go. When we finally got through, I asked the Air Canada agent if she thought that Toronto or Montréal was running better in the weather since they were both affected. She suggested going through Toronto so that’s what he did. His connecting flight ended up being late but he did get into Boston that night as planned, in time for those morning meetings.

Remember, never trust the airline’s systems to give you the best option.

Lesson #3 – Check Your Flights Early When the Weather Goes South
The last passenger whose flight was canceled actually wasn’t traveling on Sunday at all. He was traveling on Monday morning, but it was the first flight out. Normally we wouldn’t look at early morning flights until the evening before, but in this case with all of the weather issues on Sunday we decided to start looking early. When weather goes bad, cancellations start early.

Sure enough by mid-day on Sunday, his flight on Monday morning had already been canceled. In this case Delta (the airline he was on) had auto-rebooked him on the next best option on Delta, which was through Atlanta to get to Florida. Unfortunately this still arrived later than originally planned and our client was going to miss his appointment.

We were able to call Delta and even though it was a weather delay, the airline was willing to put him on another airline. In the end, he flew nonstop on American at a slightly earlier time than his original Delta flight, easily making his appointment.

Whether this would’ve been possible had we not looked into options the day before is unclear. That later it gets, the better the chance that any seats on other flights would have been taken by someone else.

I know a lot of people were stranded on Sunday as cancellations were massive. Fortunately this was a lower travel time. Had it happened one week later during the Christmas rush there wouldn’t have been very many options for anyone. But hopefully if you were stuck on Sunday you were able to find a good option and get home. If not, keep some of these options in the back of your head for next time.

Here’s the chart with the data that DOT spokesperson Jill Zuckman sent me:

It really shows how data interpretation can vary widely. According to Jill, “the data shows that there were fewer cancellations involving flights that experienced tarmac delays of more than 2 hours during May-August 2010 when compared to the same period in 2009.” Well yeah, that’s true, but more importantly, it shows that when airplanes were delayed for two hours on the ground, they were twice as likely to cancel this year than last. Now that to me seems like proof that the ground delay rule is causing cancellations, no? I mean, without the rule, you would assume that the historical percentage would still be the rate we’d see today.

But let’s go back to the aggregate number. Jill and the DOT look at this and say that the “decline can be attributed to the fact that the average number of 2+ hour tarmac delays was much lower in the first 4 months of the post rule period than in the same 4 month period in 2009.” Yes, that’s true. But why is that the case? Airlines have probably started canceling flights further in advance. Or maybe the weather just wasn’t as bad this summer as it was last. (I already dug in and showed that earlier this summer.) There are a lot of reasons why cancellations numbers can fluctuate, but in general it’s been hard to pin down the reasons on a single event until this nugget of data was brought to my attention.

Let’s think about this. It’s no surprise that the number of 2 hour ground delays is down year over year, right? I mean, when you have harsh penalties kicking in at 3 hours, of course you’re going to make changes to prevent anything staying out there over 3 hours. We knew that, but my hypothesis has been that it will negatively impact cancellations. That seems to be the case here. It looks like once airplanes are sitting on the ground for over two hours, it means there’s probably a weather problem or some other operational event that’s preventing airplanes from getting to the gate. Last year, of those flights, 4 to 8 percent were canceled in any given month. But this year, it’s 10 to 14 percent. Why would that be? Because the 3 hour rule is forcing airplanes to come back and cancel.

Without having the airlines give us specific numbers, this is the closest I’ve seen to something showing that there without a doubt have been more cancels this year because of the rule.