New Southwest CEO Says 2022 Will Still Be Transition Year for Airlines

Robert Jordan, who will replace longtime – and beloved – Southwest Airlines CEO Gary Kelly on February 1, said he realizes his carrier faces challenges as he prepares to take over.

But so does the rest of the industry, he said.

In a wide-ranging interview with David Koenig of the Associated Press, Jordan said he hoped that 2021 would be the transition year for airlines away from the COVID-19 pandemic and back to normalcy.

Unfortunately, that’s not the case.

“I think we all wished that ’21 was the transition year and ’22 was back to normal, and it’s just clear that ’22 is going to continue to be a year of continued transition,” Jordan said. “You’ve got staffing questions, just the whole hiring market that everybody’s dealing with. You’ve got continued supply-chain issues. You have the pandemic, which we all hope moves to endemic here at some point. It’s going to make predicting the business and the schedule a little choppy.”

Indeed, Jordan steps into a situation rife with problems. Southwest had suffered two separate incidents of huge delays and cancellations earlier this year, fueled in large part by being short-staffed – and that doesn’t even count the ongoing massive delays and cancellations plaguing the entire global airline scene since Christmas Eve due to the rapidly spreading Omicron variant of the virus.

Kelly announced last summer he would be stepping down. Now Jordan inherits the pandemic-related issues, a smaller airline, staffing problems and demand for increased wages to bring in more employees.

Jordan said Southwest is making progress on filling the estimated 5,000 jobs people left in the last two years from taking early retirement, and he still plans on hiring well into later this year.

“We get plenty of applications, we just don’t get as many applications for open jobs as we used to,” he said. “… The market for wages is moved and it feels like it’s continuing to move. I don’t know if there is a such thing as a minimum wage anymore because there is a market wage. It feels like $15 (an hour) has become $18 and $18 may (become) $20. It’s hard to know when you equalize and when that stops. I think you’re going to continue to see wage pressure for a while.”

Jordan added that he thinks the airline needs to modernize its operations, re-think customer service options such as considering more power outlets on seats and adapt more quickly to issues that arise.

There are no plans to move away from Southwest’s famous free baggage policy, Jordan said.

“No. We’re known for doing things that make sense for our customers. No bag fees, no change fees make perfect sense,” he said. “It’s very hard for me to imagine that we would go to assigned seating. There is absolutely no work on rethinking any of those things. But I do put (assigned seating) sort of in the never-say-never bucket.”