Case Study: Southwest Airlines achieves lower crew costs and improved reserve forecasting with Alteryx

Crew Reserve and Open Time Forecasting

Southwest Airlines faced rising crew costs and growing operational complexity — serving 100 destinations with more than 4,000 peak-day flights and a crew of 24,000 — which increased unplanned absences and “open time” (uncovered flying). Schedulers had to make next-day decisions across many categories (20 pilot seat/base combinations and 10 flight attendant bases) without reliable forecasts, risking substantial premium pay, unassigned reserves and other extra crew costs.

The Advanced Analytics & Optimization Solutions Team built two Alteryx workflows (one for pilots, one for flight attendants) that pull daily data, run time-series forecasts (using R where needed), and publish results to Tableau each morning with hourly updates and error tracking. Schedulers now receive reserve-availability and open-flights forecasts by base/seat, enabling optimized reserve assignments and premium decisions, reduced overtime and extra-reserve costs, and quick visual identification of imbalance areas.

Southwest Airlines

Alec Siems

Analyst