When I was more of a marketing consultant than a business owner consultant, I used to do a lot of crisis consulting, because no one else was doing it.

So, in that vein, I’d like to offer Southwest Airlines some advice on how to deal with their meltdown over the last few days.

1. Bob Jordan and his team need to be all over the news explaining what happened, as painful as               it may be the admit some serious mistakes. Get out in front of the crisis.

2.Explain what they did with the $7 billion in COVID relief money that they got; did they fix                      operations, keep operations going (likely), go to St. Croix, what?

3. Offer free tickets to anywhere to any passenger that feels as though they or their family was                   inconvenienced by the mess of operations. Southwest has done this in the past.

4. Offer to pay for any alternative routes that Southwest can put passengers on, along with hotels              and meals for those who can’t be alternatively routed. I thought I heard a Southwest                                spokesperson say this, but I haven’t seen a repeat of the offer. It’s standard practice for airlines              to make such an offer, so Southwest should do it, or more.

5. Over the next few months, explain what Southwest is doing to fix the procedures that caused                  the problem. Part of the problem is in Soutwest’s route layout, which is point to point, rather                than hub and spoke, which may not be fixable, but Southwest executives need to explain this to           the travelling public.

6. Run big ads in all the media (print in all your markets, radio and television) you can find with               the apology and the fixes.

There are probably more things that Southwest could do, but the above ideas are ones that we’ve advocated to clients before, and they work.