![]() The carrier had struggled to hire and train front-line employees when it resumed hiring in the autumn of last year. This has been the biggest constraint on Southwest’s recovery, CEO Bob Jordan told analysts during the company’s first-quarter earnings call on April 28. To do that, of course, Southwest needs staff. The airline said it needs about 125 aircraft to restore its schedule depth. Although schedule depth will not match 2019 levels until the latter part of this year, it has become Southwest’s focus this year. Those frequencies - known as “schedule depth” in the airline industry - allowed the airline to reaccommodate passengers in the event of a cancellation and boosted the airline’s reliability, critical to business passengers. The airline was known before the pandemic for the volume of flights it operated between two points on its route map - like Denver-Chicago, for example. Southwest is reducing the number of flights it operates to and within Hawaii and reallocating those resources to shorter-haul flights in business markets.Ĭrucially, Southwest is restoring flight frequencies between cities. March corporate travel revenue was only 36 percent off the same month in 2019, compared with 70 percent below 2019 in January. It still hasn’t returned in full, but it’s recovering faster than the airline expected. ![]() The Dallas-based airline is retooling its network away from some of the leisure-focused destinations it focused on during the depths of the pandemic to business markets as it prepares for road warriors to return.įormer CEO Gary Kelly, who stepped down earlier this year, famously said he thought about 20 percent of business travel will never return after the pandemic recedes, due to the changing nature of work and tools like videoconferencing. Recent bookings have reversed Southwest Airlines’ formerly dim view of the return of business travel, with March corporate revenue exceeding March 2019. Southwest Airlines is not finding it hard to hire new talent it's finding it hard to train new hires fast enough.
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