Snowbound

US: It’s been a long, hard winter. And while it might be romantic to sit by a fire and watch the snow fall, there’s nothing romantic about being stuck in an airport because your flight can’t take off. That’s why some US airlines are cancelling flights even before the snow comes down.

American carriers are basing their decisions on weather forecasts. If a major snowstorm is predicted, many of them cancel flights in advance. “We’ve found that it’s easier and healthier for the system to proactively cancel those flights rather than leaving it to chance,” says JetBlue spokesman Mateo Lleras.

Lleras told The New York Times that the airline has been following this policy since 2007, when a Valentine’s Day storm caused massive delays, with some passengers being forced to sit on planes for hours because they could not leave the runways. After that storm, Lleras said, it took the airline a week to get back on schedule.

“This is probably the most significant and impactful weather event in a decade,” says David Castelveter of the Air Transport Association (ATA). The ATA estimates that 14,000 flights were cancelled from 5 to 10 February alone. About a million passengers were affected by the cancellations.

Airlines are using email, blogs and text messages to notify their passengers of cancellations. American Airlines also uses Twitter and Facebook. Of course, once a flight is cancelled, most passengers still want or need to reach their destinations. This means rebooking, either by phone or via a website.

"It's not always easy to rebook through a website." Henry H. Harteveldt

“The next part of the situation that the airlines have to address is customer service,” says Henry H. Harteveldt, a travel analyst with the market and technology research firm Forrester Research. “It’s not always easy or possible for a passenger on a cancelled flight to rebook through a website,” Harteveldt comments, so airlines have to deal with large numbers of phone calls. “Hold times have soared and can be hours for some travellers,” he says.

For the airlines, cancelling flights is expensive, so the decision to keep planes on the ground must be taken carefully. “When an airplane isn’t flying, it’s not bringing in revenue,” says David Castelveter of the ATA. “You sacrifice revenue in the cities you cancel, but you try to make up for it flying the rest of the system.”