This week's excuse is half-term. It was summer holidays before. Neither of those things is unpredictable, and we get the cancellations for crew shortage anyway every day even when there isn't some holiday event. Add in the plummeting reliability of the trains - short forms and cancellations daily due to shortages and failures and it is hard to avoid the conclusion that SWR are either incompetent or incapable. It was never, ever, ever like this under Stagecoach and the current performance is frankly unacceptable.
Over two years in and WorstGroup have taken this operation a long way backwards with no sign of improvement. I expect the December timetable, with more trains scheduled to run, to be an utter fiasco.