Why Ticketmaster And Southwest Failed So Badly

Why Ticketmaster And Southwest Failed So Badly

Share to Linkedin In November of last year, the nation's biggest ticket seller — Live Nation — had a spectacular failure when tickets for Taylor Swift's Eras Tour went on sale via its Ticketmaster service, leaving thousands of customers without tickets because of a massive technology failure caused by bot attacks. There is now a Congressional investigation into this failure. Just a few weeks after the Ticketmaster debacle, tens of thousands of passengers had their holiday travel plans disrupted when Southwest Airlines' operations melted down in late December in one of the worst failures of a U. S. airline in recent memory. Strikingly, of all major U. S. carriers, Southwest was unique in its inability to quickly bounce back from weather related cancellations. As Southwest floundered, travelers were booking fares on their competitors. In both cases, while buckling technology was the immediate cause of the meltdowns, poor management was ultimately the root of the failure. The Southwest debacle is a perfect illustration of how management failures lead to service failures. Southwest's pilots, crews and equipment were stranded in the wrong places and the wrong times for days as the company's IT systems collapsed under the scale of the problem. What