Referenews

The customer-service agent greeted them after a 45-minute wait at the ticket counter and filled them in on Southwest’s woes. The agent then delivered the bad news that the next available flight is late Saturday. They are due to get home just before midnight on New Year’s Eve.

“I’m just surprised that everybody’s so calm,” Mrs. Lepich said.

It’s a relative calm for sure. 

Since Southwest’s travel trouble began unfolding a few days before Christmas, there had been chaos in every corner of the airport, passengers and airline employees said.

There was an opportunity for some businesses amid the chaos. Hotels, restaurants and bars all had an influx of stranded travelers. Many stuck travelers spent hundreds of dollars or more than they expected awaiting new flights, booking a hotel room or renting a car. 

Since then, Southwest has proactively slashed flights to get back on track. More than 200 flights to and from Phoenix alone were canceled Tuesday, according to FlightAware. Nationwide, the airline axed 65% of its flights with similar cuts in the next few days. With advance notice, fewer passengers have reason to go to the airport.

At times and in certain places Tuesday, the Phoenix airport felt almost pandemic-like. There were no snaking Southwest Airlines check-in lines, the trip through security to the airline’s concourses was a breeze and you could walk up to the

Starbucks

counter near Southwest’s gates without a wait. 

“Eerie” was how one airport volunteer post-security described it. Passenger counts are down so much, Barrio Cafe in Southwest’s D concourse closed several hours early on Monday, one employee told me.

Still, other parts of the operation are struggling. Many passengers are unable to rebook flights and locate their lost bags online. The baggage claim area in Phoenix filled from end to end with bags on Tuesday. In one corner on the tarmac, near gates D1 and D3, there were rows of luggage carts with bags that needed to be reunited with passengers from canceled flights.

In a video statement Tuesday evening, Southwest Chief Executive

Bob Jordan

 apologized to customers and said the airline is doing everything it can to get back to normal. 

Maggie Yetter, a 28-year-old travel nurse who lives in Hermosa Beach, Calif., waited in a 45-minute line in Phoenix on Tuesday to see if she could still get a flight to visit her sister in Spokane, Wash., this week. Her Tuesday flight was canceled and she couldn’t rebook online. She considered other airlines but says they were charging between $1,100 to $1,700 for a last-minute ticket.

The Southwest agent told her the earliest flight they could find was on New Year’s Eve. She received a refund for her flights and plans to skip Spokane and book a flight home on another airline.

“We thought we’d be out of the woods by now,” she says. “You look at every other airline, they’re getting people out.”

A.J. Castillo and his fiancée, Emma Ryan, had to pay for a hotel in Phoenix Monday night when they missed their connecting flight to Mexico after a long Southwest delay out of Chicago, where they live. They say they spent an estimated $500 on a hotel, dinner and drinks in Scottsdale and airport drinks on Tuesday.

They didn’t buy new clothes.

“I’ve had this shirt on since yesterday morning, basically,” Mr. Castillo, 30, said of his charcoal Roark T-shirt.

For those with last-minute flight cancellations in Phoenix, the airline has turned its sparkling new gates in the D concourse, which opened over the summer, into a passenger help area. The line for customer service help was 80 people long just after lunch Tuesday.

Baggage remains a trouble spot. 

Adil Farih, president of a Denver-based aerospace engineering firm, drove to Phoenix on Christmas Day with his wife and two children, ages 5 and 10, after their flight from Denver was canceled. They stayed overnight in Grand Junction, Colo., to break up the trip. 

“Normally, we can’t handle them in the car for 30 minutes but we did for 13 hours which is unbelievable,” he says.

Mr. Farih says he and his wife couldn’t reach Southwest to find out about the whereabouts of their three checked bags, at one point staying on hold for six hours. So Mr. Farih went to Sky Harbor in search of the bags Tuesday morning before he had coffee.

“I was just gambling,” he said. “I was like if we find them great, if not we’re going to go to Target and buy some clothes.”

One by one, with the help of a Southwest Airlines employee in baggage claim, he spotted his two Away bags and one Monos bag.

A few hours after Mr. Farih got his bags, Chicago financial adviser Louis Gilman joined a now longer line after getting a 2 a.m. call that Southwest had found the bag he checked on Christmas Eve.

“I saw the beginning of a line and it just kind of kept growing,” he says.

He was reunited with his bag in under an hour and headed back to his vacation in Sedona.

Write to Dawn Gilbertson at dawn.gilbertson@wsj.com