It may be the most wonderful time of the year, but not at the airport.

A cascade of nationwide weather disruptions and airline staffing problems swept away many D.C. locals’ carefully-laid holiday plans this week — and many are still stranded trying to get in or out of the region. Others are still trying to track down lost bags, or have given up on flying entirely in favor of renting a car or trying to score a last-minute train ticket.

In the D.C. area, the situation was especially bad at Baltimore-Washington International Airport, where more than 310 flights were canceled in the 24-hour period ending at 4 p.m on Tuesday, according to data from Flight Aware. Just over a third of flights from BWI on Tuesday were canceled as of early afternoon. Flight Aware listed the airport as one of the most impacted in the whole country, with the fourth largest number of canceled outgoing flights and the fourth largest number of canceled incoming flights.

Travelers at BWI reported hours-long lines, lost luggage, and general chaos. Many had travel itineraries on Southwest Airlines, which canceled over 60% of its flights nationally on Tuesday and Wednesday, and was responsible for the lion’s share of all flight cancellations across the country. Southwest is the largest carrier at BWI, boasting a 68.2% market share of passengers at the airport.

The airline said Monday that it would continue operating just a third of its flight schedule for “the next several days.”

Margaret Knudsen, an Eastern Shore resident, was trying to fly from Baltimore to Chicago to see family for the holidays with her husband, young daughter, and her four-month-old son. Southwest Airlines canceled their original Christmas Eve flight due to bad weather, but she was still hoping they’d be able to make it out on Monday for a visit.

But at the airport, things went from bad to worse for the family. Their replacement flight was delayed in small increments, but ultimately added up to a four-hour delay by the time they made it to the gate — where they sat for an hour and a half before the flight was canceled outright, a fact that was not reflected in the Southwest app, which continued to send them old notifications about delays.

Knudsen says she was dealing with deep disappointment that they couldn’t make their trip to introduce her infant son to family in the Midwest — on top of navigating a chaotic airport scene.

“It also was just a difficult situation to be in with a four-month-old who I was wearing in a baby carrier for about eight hours yesterday at the airport while we tried to navigate things, and also a first-grader in tow,” she said.

Knudsen described six-hour lines to speak to customer service representatives. She and her family decided to give up on the trip entirely, not even trying to rebook their tickets, and instead turned their attention to trying to get their checked luggage back, which required waiting in another 3-hour long line to tell a Southwest representative that they were not planning to go to Chicago after all.

Also checked for Chicago was their car seat — so in order to leave the airport and go to a hotel in Baltimore that evening, Knudsen’s husband had to leave her and their baby to wait in line so that he could go buy a new car seat.

“The entire time I just was worried about like, ‘What if he needs to get a diaper change and I leave the line?’ Then I’m going back into the back of the line for another three hours because I didn’t have an extra set of hands,” she said.

“After some crying on both my part and the baby’s part, there were people that kind of stepped up and were willing to help out a little bit,” Knudsen said. “An older woman made the suggestion that perhaps I take one of the abandoned wheelchairs in the luggage area just so that way I at least had a place to sit so I could nurse my baby if he was hungry.”

Finally, after a night in a nearby hotel, Knudsen and her husband managed to track down their luggage: it was sitting on the tarmac at BWI, but they were told there was not enough staff to retrieve them. Instead, the airline told them, their luggage — including most of the clothes that currently fit their baby and other essential infant-care items — would be shipped to Chicago, then back to Baltimore, and then overnight-shipped to their home on the Eastern Shore, a process that could take up to five days.

“It would have been a much easier and smoother journey if they could have just canceled it outright first thing in the morning and we could have saved ourselves a trip to the airport, and we’d still have all our stuff,” Knudsen said. “I just wish that that could have been the case because it really was just like on top of just being upset and sad that we’re not going to be able to see our family, that now we just have to go through all these logistical hoops.”

Others never even made it to the airport — which some counted as a blessing.

“When my flights home were canceled I was stuck here, alone, with no food, no gifts, not even my dog for the holidays … & later realized I was one of the luckiest Southwest travelers of the holiday because I never even made it to BWI – just the new Trader Joe’s and then my couch,” one person commented on Twitter.

Travelers attempting to fly in to BWI reported other fiascos. Some said they finally found flights back to the region that landed at Ronald Reagan National Airport or Dulles Airport — and then had to make it back to BWI to pick up stranded cars.

The impacts at National Airport and Dulles were smaller — only about 9% of flights out of Reagan National were canceled as of Tuesday afternoon — but still threw a plane-sized wrench into some locals’ travel plans. One person counted five flight cancellations in three days, two days in the St. Louis Airport and two nights at an airport hotel, trying to get from Reagan National Airport to Dallas. Others said they were stranded for additional days and hoping to make it home to D.C. later in the week.

“Our heartfelt apologies for this are just beginning,” Southwest Airlines said in a statement on Monday. The carrier said the winter weather last week had caused severe disruptions in its flight schedules and called the continuing problems “unacceptable.”

The airline said it was “fully staffed,” though mediareports suggest there were problems with the airline’s systems for communicating new schedules to employees. Southwest’s statement offered an apology to its employees but did not specify why they had “let down” their employees.

Several locals said communication from Southwest about their flight cancellations was completely nonexistent. One traveler trying to make it from Orlando to Reagan National Airport said on Twitter he’d experienced hours of delays and then a quiet cancellation in the middle of the night. When he finally made it back to D.C. — on a flight from Tampa on a different airline — his bags were lost, and Southwest Airlines said it would not pay for them to be delivered back to his home because he had taken a different airline back.

D.C. resident Sharon Eliza Nichols said her Southwest flight back to DCA from Atlanta on Tuesday was quietly canceled on Monday night — which she discovered when a friend saw news reports of Southwest flight cancellations and suggested she check. Even with the extra heads-up, she had to settle for a Delta flight two days later, requiring her to book a night in a hotel.

“If I had not been as well informed or connected or had enough people looking out for me, I might not have been aware that my flight was canceled until the next morning, which would have added several more days of time and cost and burden,” she said.

Nichols said she didn’t receive a notification that her flight had been canceled from Southwest until hours after she had rebooked, and she’s been unable to get in touch with a Southwest agent, despite making dozens of calls. Some have come up with a busy signal, ended with a message saying the number is no longer in service, or dropped entirely.

“This mess might have been triggered by the storm that happened about a week ago. But it was predictable what they needed to do, and they’ve faced bad weather before during busy holiday season,” said Nichols, who is the communications director for D.C. Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton. “So it seems like there were some bad decisions made between the time of the storm and now.”

Nichols and Knudsen said the delays were costly. Nichols said she’d been able to put about $500 of unexpected expenses on a credit card, and Knudsen said she’d need to replace a number of baby-care essentials in addition to paying for the family’s night in a hotel in Baltimore as they waited to try to get their luggage. One man who said he used a wheelchair was forced to rebook his ticket on American Airlines, which he said does not offer priority boarding for wheelchair users — meaning he had to pay several thousand dollars for a first-class ticket to ensure he was accommodated.

Some other airlines were also affected by the winter weather over the weekend. Alexandria mayor Justin Wilson said he and his family were planning to fly home from a vacation in Puerto Rico on Christmas Day, but JetBlue canceled the flight and rebooked them to depart on Tuesday, two days later. The family spent Christmas night waiting in a six-hour line at the San Juan airport.

“My kids both got to practice their ability to sleep anywhere,” he said. “My daughter got a few hours of sleep on the floor of the airport, which was really impressive. I told her that’s a really good skill for life, to be able to sleep under any circumstances.”