By Loan-Anh Pham. San Jose Spotlight. Bay City News.
For thousands of travelers, Christmas cheer turned into a sack of coal due to mass flight cancellations at the San Jose airport, caused by a "once-in-a-generation" weather event and ill-prepared airlines.
Flight cancellations began on Christmas Eve and continued to rise throughout the week, officials at the Mineta San Jose International Airport said. Southwest Airlines, one of the major carriers at the airport, had the most cancellations. Southwest canceled 60 percent of flights due to bad weather conditions, airport officials said.
"The initial weather delays that we saw across all airlines over the past weekend are not entirely unusual when winter weather occurs across the country, but the continued impacts on Southwest's operation are highly unusual," the spokeswoman said. airport, Ana Maria State, to San Jose Spotlight.
The storm of cancellations will likely affect the number of trips for the holiday season, he said.
"We do not have any projections regarding delays or cancellations," he said. "This is very difficult to determine, as interruptions can appear."
The holidays ended abruptly for Duyen Luong Nguyen.
The San Jose resident had a flight to Miami with his wife for Christmas to visit his sister and granddaughter. He and his wife found out their flight was canceled during their layover in Phoenix.
«After that, we booked? a flight for? on the 26th and that night they said it was cancelled," Nguyen told San Jose Spotlight in Vietnamese. «We booked the 27th, we cancelled. We booked the 28th, we canceled."
After days of trying and failing to get another flight, the 74-year-old threw in the towel and drove 13 hours from Phoenix back home. He never saw his relatives, who by then had returned to Vietnam.
Nguyen returned to the airport Thursday morning trying to figure out how to get his tickets refunded.
Meanwhile, the holidays are just beginning for Mariia Derevianko. The Seattle marketing professional is on a long trip to see her family in the Ukraine, which celebrates Christmas on January 7.
In the span of one morning, Derevianko, 34, had the first leg of his trip from Seattle to San Jose cancelled. He quickly rebooked a flight to San Francisco International Airport and took an Uber to San Jose. He will travel on Alaska Airlines to London and then to Krakow, Poland, followed by a 10-hour bus ride to Ukraine. Any delay will ruin every part of your trip, Derevianko said.
"When I missed my flight here, it affected everything," Derevianko told San Jose Spotlight. "I'm only going to have about seven or eight days with them. It's a long road for a short period of time."
Christmas is different this year, Derevianko said, with the ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine and the daily sirens of air raids in his family's neighborhood. He still looks forward to the time he has with his family, he added.
"My uncle died at the front," Derevianko said. "Every family has been affected by the death of someone or by the loss of everything they had, the business they always had or the house they lived in."
Derevianko said that he is crossing his fingers to reach his final destination.
"It's a long road for sure, but I'm glad I got to do it," Derevianko told San Jose Spotlight.
Kristine Hedaria's travel plans are up in the air. She planned to ring in the new year by hitting the icy waves of the Atlantic Ocean with her sister, but her flight to Boston to visit her brothers, nieces and nephews was cancelled.
«He asked me if I wanted to jump into the ocean ?en? the first day of the year," Hedaria told San Jose Spotlight. "I was like, you know what? I will do that?".
The 24-year-old said she is overwhelmed and worried but is still hoping to secure another flight to the East Coast. She works full time and can only have time off during the holidays.
"I have to pay my bills," said Hedaria. "I only get to see them once a year and I have no family in the area. So this is really annoying."
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