Southwest Airlines Is Ditching Open Seating on Flights | Hacker News Reader

Southwest Airlines Is Ditching Open Seating on Flights

wsj.com

29 pointscwwc26 comments

As someone who used to take two WN flights a week, I dislike these changes, and I predict they won’t last, if they ever take effect at all.

The CEO’s “research” appears shambolic and dumbs down what engenders such loyalty to Southwest. Next thing you’ll know they’ll add 777’s, ERJ’s, and A320’s to the bestiary, because it’s also what the other airlines do. Southwest became the leader because they led and went their own way instead of followed.

At the end of the day, 90% of Southwest fliers choose Southwest because of price and availability. Embiggening the boarding process with boarding zones won’t sell more seats, particularly middle seats.

The 10% of business travelers who choose Southwest crave its no-fuss “Greyhound of the skies” approach, and these will be the most turned off.

CEO pay is like telling your driver to redline the engine all he wants. He’ll outperform the competition (with significant personal upside) until he blows the engine (and gets replaced a few years later, having earned billions).

If you read other forums, what used to be a quick and efficient boarding process has gotten out of control and the efficiency has disappeared.

Between preboarding dozens of wheelchair-bound passengers (who get up and run off the plane at the destination) and taking valuable time to settle fights between passengers saving seats for others with purses and jackets... it's just not worth it anymore.

> dozens of wheelchair-bound passengers (who get up and run off the plane at the destination)

That is definitely not a normal (or even believable) occurrence

Of course it's not normal, but it happens all the time. These people hacked the system. When the processes are terrible, people will find a way around them if it's available.

I have never seen this in my decades of flying SW.

There are eyewitness accounts all over the net.

Here's a (viral) photo of 20 wheelchairs at FLL, 17 of them ran off the plane: https://x.com/trendready/status/1672734536545841153

There was someone on Reddit that counted 45.

Other accounts from last December, noting the trend and including SWA's reply that they don't challenge the validity of people in wheelchairs: https://viewfromthewing.com/priority-boarding-scandal-is-sou...

That’s easily solvable by seating wheelchair-bound passengers in the back of the plane so they have to wait to get off.

The issue is more about loading times. Every minute the aircraft is on the ground is a minute they're not making money.

If a 737 used to take 60 minutes to unload and load and now it takes 90 or more, there's a problem.

When SWA first started, the target was 10 minutes to turn a plane around. They were literally taxiing out of the gate while people were still getting seated.

https://southwest50.com/our-stories/a-turning-point-the-birt...

It depends on what sort of customers they want to target. Open seating is fine for solo travelers but miserable for families with multiple children.

You have that backwards.

Open seating (the way WN does it) involves boarding families with children between the A and B groups. They're not getting front row, but they mathematically can sit together no matter how many of them there are. That is, unless the family only has C boarding passes and waits for their C rows to be called.

On a different airline, I've witnessed, firsthand, families all booked on noncontiguous middle seats in the back of the plane. Once one of them tried to sit in my aisle seat, and I got to choose between an uncompensated downgrade to their middle seat, or narc'ing them out to the flight attendant, for whom I have zero trust that they'll not make things worse for everybody.

Having met multiple prison corrections officers and flight attendants in my lifetime, my order of trust to help me with my interpersonal issues goes Southwest, CO, non-Southwest.

Southwest is not "the leader" of anything. They're struggling. If they were doing well there would be no motivation to add these changes. They lost 231 million dollars last quarter.

I personally stopped flying Southwest years ago when someone blatantly cut in line while boarding (like a whole section earlier) and I told the gate agent and he rolled his eyes at me and said "we're all trying to get going" I think their seating and check in system is dumb especially when they set up this elaborate system where you have to rush to check in exactly 24 hours before then get mad when you expect them to enforce it.

Fuck Southwest

As a person who had never flown SWA until a few years ago, they have become my go-to airline for most domestic travel.

I flew business for years on Continental, then United, then when I stopped flying for work in 2012, I started flying for pleasure a lot more. I still kept flying United because that was where all my rewards and perks were. When I stopped getting my automatic upgrade to business/first and had to fly the ever worsening economy class, I switched to SWA for everything domestic. I pay for the ticket that comes with "early bird" check-in, because I'm not going to remember to check in, and my flights always come out way cheaper. On a particularly full flight, I might upgrade to A1-15 for my wife or I, so that one of us can stake a decent row.

There have been people who try to cut in line, and usually they back down after you inspect their boarding pass and politely remind them that C group is after A and B. Sometimes they listen. Other times they they pretend to be dense, and other passengers my badger them to remove themselves. If they stay, then they stay. One person cutting in line isn't the end of the world. Especially if you are already part of the A boarding group.

On United, when flying longer distances that I will want more comfort (from business class offerings), I see they usually have a gate attendant doing line sweeps to make sure everyone is lined up correctly either for their fancy 1MM+ miles club, military, or Group 1. They are less likely to enforce Group 2's (or whatever comes after).

So all-in-all, I think SWA does a fine job at minmaxing (for the customer) price and convenience, while United (and I'm sure most legacy full-service airlines) are more about max-maxing.

Your assigned seat won’t be worth squat when a parent with two screaming, seat kicking, kids sit behind you. The flexibility of Southwest’s seating model allowed the 20% of us who favor it to “game” the system on their perpetually 100% loaded flights (don’t sit by kids, select two open seats with slender person in third seat, etc.). I’ve been dreading this. To me, they just gave up their competitive advantage.

Adding charging to seats, listing prices on Google Flights, and allowing seat selection are recent moves that will take Southwest off my "never fly" list.

I've read arguments for 1 and 3 (in this thread) but what's the issue with 2 "listing prices on Google Flights"?

At the end of May 2024, Southwest started listing prices for flights in Google flight search feature. Prior to that prices were only available through Southwest website's (kind of crappy) flight search. Given that Southwest prices were often higher anyway, it was not worth my time to check prices on southwest.com in addition to Google. Now Southwest is at least a contender for flights I book.

As a guy with wide shoulders, I only fly Southwest because I can see and choose to sit next to sometime that does not also have wide shoulders. Otherwise flying is really uncomfortable or even painful for both of us. I’ve been a loyal customer for a decade but will be done with Southwest if they do this.

Who will you turn to?

Probably fly less and possibly fly business class

Honestly, I think this is a good thing. It has always been a bit of an annoyance to me when I have to fly southwest that my ability to get a decent seat comes down to a combination of how quickly I check in and if I want to pay them money to move into a better boarding group. It ends up as an additional source of stress that adds to an already annoyingly stressful process, whereas with every other usual domestic airline, you can pick your seat when getting the ticket, and you won't have to worry about where you end up stuck sitting.

Ditto. The lack of assigned seats has been the number one reason why I have avoided Southwest. I usually like to pay for seat upgrades. I have found that there seems to be an unwritten code amongst upgraders that we're not going to be terrible flyers (eating crunchy/smelly food, talking loudly on their phone, trying to talk to other passengers that obviously aren't interested). I know Southwest lets you pay extra for early boarding, but you still might end up sitting next to someone that trundles onto the plane with a giant bag of popcorn, takes their shoes and socks off, and wants to talk to you about the election.

I used to fly SWA quite a bit, but the past few years they are often more expensive than American for the same routes out of my area (DFW), or, require connections when I could get a direct flight on American for the same price or less. Unless I'm flying with a lot of bags, its generally cheaper lately on another airline. I did love SWA's open seating and hope this change doesn't stick, but they no longer seem to have the cost advantage over the other carriers going for them. I fear if this change goes through, its only a matter of time before they start charging for checked bags and then they will be no different from any other airline.

I always specifically flew Southwest because I loved this policy, and shunned every other airline specifically because of a lack of a like policy.

For me it was great because as a person with a shaved head and a long goatee, most people would avoid sitting next to me until seats got into last resort, which simply meant extra comfort usually the more angry I looked that day. I'd usually even pay to board early to get a window seat for this reason.

I haven't flown in the past 5 years or more now, I'll be annoyed the next time I have to with Southwest again, damn them.

https://archive.ph/rhvXM

Finally. Now start supporting third party booking sites and I may actually start considering Southwest as a serious option. Lining up at the gate by number like a schoolchild and praying that I can scramble fast enough to avoid a middle seat was fine when I was 19 and wanted the cheapest possible fare. Now, not a chance. Which sucks because they do have a very good network in the US.

Isn’t the reason southwest didn’t support third party booking was because they didn’t allow their fares to be advertised? Which was a result of them not wanting to be compared side by side with airlines who did not include two free checked bags with the ticket (eg every single other airline)? Which the Biden administration a few months ago announced rules requiring that airlines list these fees alongside the price of the ticket, subsequently removing the only reason Southwest needed to do that?

As of two months ago due to the aforementioned regulations change southwest is now on Google flights, maybe third party booking is soon to follow: https://www.forbes.com/sites/geoffwhitmore/2024/05/25/southw...

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