You get what you pay for.
Holiday travel has been a headache this year.
Record numbers have pent up demand to visit grandma and have jammed the highways and flyways.
Road travel is always bad with the combination of cheap gas, more traffic and crappy weather. So much that I long gave up on holiday travel by road in the winter especially after headaches in snow and ice storms and the desire to travel 300-400 miles by road. Even the Interstates were bad.
Air travel is another story and this past weekend airlines cancelled thousands of flights due to the heavy snow that blanketed everything from the Midwest to the East. Once you get a Chicago size airport closing, it jams up flights for everyone. Large carriers, for the most part have recovered, but not Southwest.
Why Southwest? Well most airlines employ a hub strategy, that links smaller airports via a connection at a larger one. That meant for me, when I lived in New England you had to make a connection on flight. I expected that for international trips to the Caribbean and would plan to travel through Miami southbound and Charlotte, if possible northbound.
But Southwest flew direct and many were between smaller airports. I only flew once on SWA about 16 years ago and it was between Hartford, CT and Baltimore, MD. I didn't care for the cattle herding boarding, but I was travelling alone.
Well this system of moving passengers and crew failed. SWA is still backed up and doesn't expect to recover until next week.
You get what you pay for.
The flights out of New England were always at 600 ish in the morning, and since it would be the first flight out, we rarely had a problem in a snow storm. Returning would be close to midnight, but we were always happy to see the pups.
So the flight south would continue and most of the time without incident, except when thunderstorms would disrupt connections but that is a summer problem.
Returning meant passing through customs, and that is another story. In the meantime I recommend Precheck.
You get what you pay for.
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