Day in the life of
Crew Hotels &Transportation Manager – Rachel Orsak
I am the Crew Hotels & Transportation Manager at Southwest Airlines. My current role is a little unique since most aviation jobs are out in the field – in the air or at the airport.
When Pilots and Flight Attendants are out on trips and overnighting away from home, they need accommodations and transportation to and from the airport.
My husband used to travel for business frequently, and he didn’t understand why crew members couldn’t just book their own hotels. But when you have thousands of individuals needing a hotel room on any given night, it would be extremely inefficient and costly to have everyone fending for himself/herself.
Southwest has the crew overnight function set up uniquely compared to the vast majority of other airlines. We have a board of Flight Attendants and Pilots (the Crew Accommodations Board or “CAB”) who source the market and select the hotels we’ll use. (Other airlines use their Supply Chain Management group or a third party to select vendors for crews..)
The structure works well at Southwest because the ones who are making the hotel selections are the ones who will be using the end product. They have firsthand experience with crew members’ unique needs (for example, quiet rooms away from elevators and ice machines that may disturb rest, blackout curtains for “PM fliers” who get in very late at night and sleep until late morning, and a full-service restaurant with extended hours – since Southwest doesn’t serve meals on our flights, crew members typically don’t eat a hot meal all day until they arrive at the hotel).
Once a hotel selection is made and contract terms are negotiated, the work is handed off to my team, and we handle the administrative side.
My team
My typical day
As in many jobs, a “typical” day is hard to define, since I am constantly watching for the next emergency to pop up. The bulk of my work week consists of monitoring my email inbox and responding to questions, complaints, requests, and issues. I generally receive close to 1000 emails per week, most of which require some type of action on my part.
As such, my days always begin with opening up my email and catching up on anything that happened overnight. This can take anywhere between 20 minutes and a couple of hours. I am an “inbox zero” kind of person, so I try to respond to the emails as soon as I can – I definitely feel a sense of satisfaction when my inbox is empty.
Of course, I continue to get more emails throughout the day, but in between, I have a few ongoing responsibilities, like reviewing contracts, approving invoices for payment, and performing data analytics, especially around the cost of our hotels and the complaints that we receive.
I built and maintain a website with all of the information the Crew Accommodations Board needs to do their jobs, like copies of our contracts, contact information for our partners and our sources, recent hotel complaints we’ve received, and job manuals with how-to guides for almost everything we do.
My team and I update hotel amenities and transportation instructions like restaurant hours and airport shuttle pickup location so Flight Attendants and Pilots can plan accordingly.
Because we don’t serve meals on Southwest flights, crew members typically don’t get a full meal until they arrive at their hotel for the night. Occasionally they have a long enough layover to get food from an airport restaurant before the next flight. Our Crew Accommodations Board worked with all of our properties to come up with some type of food offering that was financially feasible for the hotel, and we kept crew members up-to-date with this information. Another wrench in this cycle was the ever-changing government mandates regarding the operation of food establishments. As hotels had to change their food and beverage offerings to comply with new regulations, we kept crew members informed so they could plan accordingly to ensure they actually got a meal. Our normal volume of changes in this arena is about 20 per year – in 2020, we made over 1500 updates.
Several times a week (sometimes several times a day), issues will pop up at our hotels, and we’ll need to spring into action. Most often, it’s something that may seem small to other travelers, like the power or water goes out at a hotel. However, since crew members (especially Pilots) have very specific rest requirements to ensure the safety of passengers, we often need to move the crew members to a new hotel with power and water rather than waiting to see if the issue can be resolved.
I came from an audit background, so I am also always on the lookout for ways I can make my job and my team’s jobs easier and more effective. I have a long list of projects that I’d like to get to one day, like enhancing our reporting capabilities and the way we capture and consolidate our data. This may not seem like a data-heavy job, but a lot of data actually goes into decisions about which hotel and transportation companies to partner with (for example, the number of complaints compared to the number of overnights and our average daily rate or “ADR” across all of our hotels over time).
I spend pretty much all of my free time working on these types of process-improvement projects. My two biggest accomplishments so far in the year and a half I have been in this role are 1) moving to a completely paperless environment (until the end of 2019, the team actually mailed contracts back and forth! We had huge file cabinets full of papers that the team accessed every single day), and 2) creating a SharePoint website for the Crew Accommodations Board to be able to access the information they need anywhere and anytime. They do not have access to the “shared drive” on the Southwest network that my administrative team has, so they used to have to email one of the headquarters employees anytime they needed a copy of a contract, a summary of the complaints, or someone’s contact information.
Pros
- For the first time in my career, my work actually affects people. If my team and I don’t do our jobs, crew members don’t have a place to sleep at night. I see the direct correlation between my work and the safety and well-being of others, which I love.
- For me personally, I have a lot of control over what I work on in between emails. All of the process improvement-focused work that I do is self-imposed. I love being able to see a need and meet that need.
- After I created the SharePoint site, one of the team members told me they had been asking for a resource like that for years. No one had mentioned that to me that in advance – I simply thought a repository of information like this would be helpful, and I put in the work to make it happen. It is very fulfilling to be able to add value for my coworkers in ways like this.
- I worked in Southwest’s Internal Audit department prior to this role, and I love working on the operational side of the business now. A lot of the work I did in Internal Audit was not airline- or Southwest-specific. I could have been auditing the process at any company, and the work would have been similar. Moving into this space, I love actually getting to see firsthand that I work for an airline.
- An obvious pro of working at an airline, in general, is standby travel benefits, although it can be very difficult to actually get on a flight sometimes! Travel plans must be held loosely because flight loads can (and do) change at any minute.
- I also love working for Southwest, so for me, that is definitely a pro of my job. I have the utmost respect for our executive leadership, and I appreciate the culture we’ve been able to maintain even throughout the pandemic.
Standby trip to Holland with a friend from work
Cons
- While I do work an 8-5 schedule, I also am essentially on-call 24/7 in case an emergency pops up and we need to move crew members to a new hotel. Sometimes, a few weeks may go by without needing to do after-hours work, but other times, it seems like there is something new to deal with every single day. When it rains, it pours!
- This is my first job in which I don’t control the flow of information. I wish I spent less time answering emails and more time working on value-add projects.
- Because of Southwest’s growth over the years (especially our recent growth), my team’s workload has increased dramatically without an increase in our team size. It is tough to manage all of the different relationships and needs of our partners, crew members, and company leaders when we are understaffed.
