The Latest Hurricane Milton Travel Updates – Condé Nast Traveler
What about the people who were going to Florida on vacation during the hurricane? Well, it was pretty late to change plans, but airlines are much better at being flexible.
What do Southwest and American have in common? Certainly not their Q2 performance. American had a very down quarter as expected, but Southwest actually surprised with better numbers than I would have guessed. It’s all there in the DB1B data, and Jon and I broke it down this week on The Air Show.
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1 comment on “Cranky on the Web: Hurricanes and a Data Dive”
When checking a few carriers’ web sites during & immediately after the storm (i.e., Wednesday/Thursday), it was interesting to see was how carriers differed in included mention of the hurricanes & their hurricane waiver policies.
Allegiant & Delta had the hurricane information buried in the usual subpages, which required a good 5ish clicks to get to the information even if you knew where it would likely be. They also provided little or no details by airport. Considering how many flights Delta has in the Southeast/FL region that two of Allegiant’s major bases (PGD & PIE) were within an hour’s drive of the Milton’s landfall, this was very disappointing and surprising.
In contrast, JetBlue had links to its hurricane info not only “above the fold”, but literally at the TOP of its homepage, before all the usual stuff; you couldn’t avoid seeing it. JetBlue also had details for each of the airports it operates out of that had been impacted by Hurricane Milton.
Regardless of actual policies and how each airline recovered from the hurricane (which might be a good article for a blog post or Air Show podcast discussion), the difference in how the airlines presented the information (and what information they chose to share) was quite stark. On that basis, JetBlue appeared FAR more consumer friendly than Delta or Allegiant, who seemed to almost be “hiding” or “ignoring” the hurricane info out of fear that unaffected customers would take advantage of it.