President Biden says his administration will hold airlines accountable for the high number of flight cancelations across the nation in recent days after a winter storm wreaked havoc on holiday travel.
“Thousands of flights nationwide have been canceled around the holidays,” Biden tweeted Tuesday. “Our Administration is working to ensure airlines are held accountable.”
The president then instructed anyone impacted by flight cancelations to visit the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Airline Customer Service Dashboard to see if they might be entitled to compensation.
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Biden’s message followed a Monday tweet from USDOT targeting Southwest Airlines, which experienced far greater operational disruptions than any other U.S. carrier.
The department vowed to “closely examine whether cancellations were controllable and whether Southwest is complying with its customer service plan, as well as all other pertinent DOT rules.”
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Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg also said Monday that he was tracking the situation with Southwest “closely” and would “have more to say” on the issue Tuesday.
A powerful winter storm that brought blizzard conditions to several states just before Christmas caused widespread flight disruptions and cancelations over the weekend, leaving thousands of passengers stranded at airports across the country.
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Southwest was impacted far worse that other airlines with more than 12,000 cancelations since Friday. While other carriers appeared to have largely recovered from the disruptions by Tuesday, Southwest was still reeling.
After Southwest canceled over 70% of its flights Monday, CEO Bob Jordan told The Wall Street Journal customers could expect “another tough day” Tuesday.
The airline said in an earlier update that it would be operating on roughly one third of its schedule “for the next several days” as it regroups.
As of around 1 p.m. Eastern Time Tuesday, more than 3,100 flights in total were canceled within, into, or out of the U.S. for the day according to flight tracking site FlightAware. Most of those cancelations were from Southwest, which scrapped 2,571, or 63% of its flights.
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A Southwest spokesperson told FOX Business it would post another update to its website on Tuesday.