Post-holiday travel at Chicago’s Midway International Airport was a nightmare for some Monday, with hundreds of flight cancellations and luggage strewn around the airport as airlines coped with the lingering effects of the weekend’s winter storm.
More than half of Southwest Airlines’ flights at the airport were canceled on Monday, but travelers were finding it difficult to retrieve their bags, with luggage piling up at carousels and few answers to be found.
“I’m angry as hell, because I see mismanagement,” Ihore Konrad, who has been stranded at the airport for two days because of cancellations, said.
In all, more than 300 flights were canceled at Midway as of 5 p.m. Monday.
Amid that chaos, NBC 5 photographer George Mycek captured images of hundreds of bags strewn around the airport, with luggage from multiple flights snarling operations at carousels in the baggage claim areas.
Travelers say they haven’t been able to get enough information to track down their bags.
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“At first we were told that our bags would be down here, so we went and searched the whole area. My bag is kind of distinctive, and I can’t find it,” Dori Velligan said.
Terry Velligan says that the family was planning to head to New Orleans, but instead they’ve had to spend hours just trying to track down their luggage.
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“We took off work to go to New Orleans, and so now we are here spending all our vacation looking for our bags,” he said.
Chicago resident Mark Buckley told a similar story. His daughter was delayed a day in arriving in Chicago last week, but her bags didn’t get there at the same time.
In fact, Buckley says that the airline told the family that her bags were in Denver, but they were actually inside Midway Airport.
Ultimately, it was an Apple air tag inside of the bag that enabled the family to find it.
Southwest says that it is not experiencing “staffing issues,” but that conflicting schedules have made it difficult to get crews onto their assigned flights.
“It is a scheduling issue, not a staffing issue,” a spokesperson told NBC 5.
Shortly after those statements, the airline issued a public apology.
"Our heartfelt apologies for this are just beginning," the airline said in a release. "We’re working with safety at the forefront to urgently address wide-scale disruption by rebalancing the airline and repositioning crews and our fleet ultimately to best serve all who plan to travel with us. We were fully staffed and prepared for the approaching holiday weekend when the severe weather swept across the continent, where Southwest is the largest carrier in 23 of the top 25 travel markets in the U.S. This forced daily changes to our flight schedule at a volume and magnitude that still has the tools our teams use to recover the airline operating at capacity."
It remains unclear when Southwest will resume normal operations. The airline is reminding travelers that they can receive refunds or flight credits for canceled flights, but lines at service counters have been jampacked throughout the day, and attempts to call customer service lines have also been challenging, travelers tell NBC 5.
