Southwest Scraps Open Seating, Ending Decades-Long Practice (yahoo.com) 55
Southwest Airlines announced Thursday that it will get rid of open seating in a sweeping change from its decades-long practice. Instead, it will begin assigning seats and offer premium seating with extra leg room. From a report: Southwest CEO Bob Jordan said, "Our implementation of assigned and premium seating is part of an ongoing and comprehensive upgrade to the Customer Experience, one that research shows Customers overwhelmingly prefer."
The low-fare airline has had a tradition of open seating for more than 50 years. Customers taking longer flights preferred assigned seats, according to Southwest. Airlines can also charge more for assigned and premium seating, enabling them to boost profits.
The low-fare airline has had a tradition of open seating for more than 50 years. Customers taking longer flights preferred assigned seats, according to Southwest. Airlines can also charge more for assigned and premium seating, enabling them to boost profits.
Re:News for nerds. Stuff that matters. (Score:5, Funny)
So I suspect you voted it down in the firehose? No? Well then don't complain. Headlines exist to allow you to skip over things which don't interest you.
Blink twice if someone is holding a gun to your head forcing you to read every Slashdot story.
But that would be abusing the system (Score:3)
We're supposed to be looking for reasons to promote the good stuff, not reasons to downmod or downvote, isn't that so? I recently spent fifteen mod points, most of them +(insightful, informative, interesting funny). In the firehose as well, I upvote the good stuff; I don't go out of my way to downvote the junk. I assume (foolishly, to be sure) that /. will manage to separate the wheat from the chaff. That was explicitly asked of me and I have complied in good faith.
This time, I think the system has fai
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> ... and with registrations closed it's only going to get worse.
This was the only bit of news in this conversation that I found interesting. When did Slashdot kill registration? I can guess at the why.
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Matters to me as Southwest is the only airline I've flown domestically since 2016. That's coming to an end soon due to this change.
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Yeah, why this on /.?
Price Premiums vs. Throwing the Dice (Score:4, Insightful)
Southwest is a cattle car. A good cattle car, but a cattle car nonetheless.
If you're in the "A" group, you'll get your choice of Window or Aisle. If you're one of the coveted A1-15 (?) then you might get an exit row window or aisle. It's a throw of the dice.
The possibility of extra money seems to have outweighed the unhappy customer comments about having to take the last remaining seat on the plane: the middle of the back row.
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And if you didn't want to pay the $$ to get in the A group you have to be online and hitting enter trying to get in the front of the B group.
I think this will be for the better and solve the issue of 'seat saving' that has been getting worse.
I only use SW for local/short flights so I can survive on a middle seat but I'm not of the opinion if it's less than 4 hours driving I'll just get in the car and let my comma.ai handle the driving for the most part.
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Except anyone who is A-List preferred (which is a lot of people) will get automatically checked-in before you. So you are behind Business, Early-bird, and A-List preferred. Consider yourself lucky if you get in the B group, you're not supposed to be there.
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The Big 3 (United/Delta/American) airlines play a bit of a different game than Southwest (which has previously been fairly egalitarian). Their customer base is segmented into clearly defined tiers. On top, you have business travelers who frequently purchase last minute overseas premium cabin tickets. Those are very profitable customers, so they board first and tend to get to pick seats near the front (or get free first class upgrades) even when they purchase last minute. Then, you have regular frequent flye
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The opposite side is that most other airlines charge for anything but the basics in any of the coach classes. It's getting to be like RyanAir** in Europe where you can't
Southwest open seating is not what it once was (Score:5, Informative)
Back in the day -- pre 9/11 -- you'd get to the gate, and get a card that was your order. First come, first serve. The only exception was preboarding stuff for people who really needed it (medical, kids, whatever). If you were willing to wait a little longer at the gate, you could pretty much guarantee yourself a halfway decent seat.
Between then and now, things have changed a lot.
Somewhere along the line they went to A/B/C boarding groups, but that was mostly a rename.
At some point, they got rid of the cards you got at the gate, and you got assigned a number when you checked in. Then, at some point (maybe at the same time), online checkin was added. As people figured that out, there came this race 24 hours ahead of time where you would rapid-reload the website to see if the checkin button was enabled, so you could get a low enough number that you wouldn't be stuck with a middle seat. Never mind you being willing to take the hit of sitting at the airport a bit longer to have a good seat; it was the rapid-reload race. If you forget, or weren't able to be online at exactly the right time, you probably ended up in the C boarding group.
Somewhere along the line, they also realized that they could make more money by selling the numbers in the A group. So, a big swath of A was set aside and not available, and you could pay extra later for premium seating. So, yeah, even though they were advertising "open seating", at this point they had the same premium seating sales that every other airline had (sort of -- the seats weren't any better, you just got in line earlier).
Southwest's "open seating" always had some serious drawbacks to go along with its advantages. Over time, they've whittled away the advantages, and created some new stressors along the way. So, no wonder that nobody likes it any more. If we could create a parallel universe where their open seating today still worked like it did 25 years ago, I suspect the poll numbers would be different. (Impossible to know.)
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Between then and now, things have changed a lot.
Yep, the cost of flying has plummeted.
I disagree with your assertion that there were advantages. Airports are shit places, getting in early to get a good seat is not something I ever want to have to do again. I pay extra to minimise the time I spend there. And it happens to coincide with getting good seats guaranteed.
Southwest (Score:2)
I remember flying Southwest, on one of the larger three row planes, a long time ago. You got a plastic tag with your boarding group. This was your boarding pass. You handed the tag to the gate attendant, who just put them back onto a stack. The whole plane boarded in something like ten minutes. Being my first time flying, I thought that's just how it worked.
My next flight was Northwest, which had assigned seating and you had to scan your boarding pass. It took twice as long to board a plan that sat half as
KLM (Score:2)
KLM is my default airline and they have a nice points program, (and KLM shares flight codes/planes with Delta among others). KLM loyalty members get 1 free international 44 pound (20 kilo) check-in plus free seat-selection at the time of ticket purchase. Membership is free and worth it!
Re:Southwest (Score:5, Interesting)
General seating was the fastest, but also rated the most stressful and least satisfactory for passengers. The best combination of speed and satisfaction came with the "reverse pyramid" method which is a modified windows, middle, aisle ordering.
Trouble is, airlines don't want to optimize for speed or satisfaction. They want to optimize for profit. This includes giving perks like early boarding privileges to frequent fliers. They've kind of screwed the pooch on that, though. By cramming in as many seats as possible and charging for checked bags they've really put a premium on overhead bin space, so no one pays attention to zone assignments. Everyone wants to board early so they have a place to put their maximum-allowed-size carry-on. I expect that selling seats with guaranteed overhead space will be the next "innovation" in ticket sales.
If they *really* wanted to speed things up they'd find a way to do containerized passenger compartments. Load the passengers into a standard-size container in the terminal. When a plane lands the passenger container is removed and put onto a bus frame to go to the terminal while the airframe is serviced for its next flight. Then the next flight's container is trucked out and attached. Passengers could board at a leisurely pace long before the plane has even arrived from its previous flight. The container would double as the waiting area at the gate.
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One thing worth noting is that boarding faster doesn't necessarily mean getting on your way faster. A lot of times, the baggage handlers and caterers are still loading the plane even after the passengers have boarded. So even if they could guarantee faster boarding, there wouldn't necessarily be a point other than people would be waiting in their seats while baggage is loading rather than getting to them.
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"Trouble is, airlines don't want to optimize for speed or satisfaction."
The trouble is most people don't fly that much and have to be retrained with every flight how to follow a complicated one-off procedure.
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The other problem is carryon baggage. One of the big reasons to board early is to avoid gate-checking your bag. Otherwise, if you happen to be one of the last to board, the overhead compartments are probably full.
In the end, there really is no satisfactory way to do things.
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Trouble is, airlines don't want to optimize for speed or satisfaction. They want to optimize for profit. This includes giving perks like early boarding privileges to frequent fliers. They've kind of screwed the pooch on that, though.
That's the crazy thing, and probably a bean-counter related issue. If you chop out 20 minutes of gate time for each flight, you can squeeze in a few more flights per gate per day, or even reduce the number of gates. A plane full of paying passengers makes more profit than nickel and diming existing passengers, whom can usually optimize their way out of the extra fees.
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I hated their bullshit cattle calls 25 years ago.
Why would I hate them less today, even if they hadn't made them worse?
Let me pick a seat when I buy my ticket, so I can decide whether I want to fly with you at all. That's fair, and that's why they didn't do it before.
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You can thank the Hedge Funds for this (Score:5, Interesting)
Over time, they've whittled away the advantages, and created some new stressors along the way.
How well open seating works or doesn't work at Southwest isn't the point of this. This is just public Kabuki theater, and the article writer really does a disservice to the reader by not delving into WHY Southwest is doing this: Paul Singer and his activist investor hedge fund, Elliot Investment Management.
If you don't know who this is, you should, because he's a one-man wrecking corporate wrecking ball, feared by corporations and governments across the world. He pioneered the field of "Vulture Investing", i.e. looking for distressed debts, from both companies and entire countries, buying them on the cheap, and then suing them into oblivion to get the maximum return. This is the man that tried to seize an Argentine navy ship [ft.com] while pursuing payment on Argentine government debt. He's the latest twist on the old "corporate raider" model of buying companies when they're in down mode, and then breaking them up and selling the parts for maximum value. And that word, "value", is the high holy commandment for Singer. He's made it clear that he puts shareholder value above all else. Above future projects and investments that might pay off for the company much later. Above employees and their families. Maximum. Shareholder. Value. That's all that matters to him. How to bring up the stock price now. Then he can sell the company off for a large profit, even if he leaves it wounded. Got a radical new idea that might revolutionize your business and make lots of money, but it's expensive to research and the payoff is down the road? The next iPhone? The next Facebook? The next game franchise? Too bad. Shit-Can it, now, and put the cash back to shareholder dividends.
Elliot Management now owns 11% of Southwest, the biggest single investor. And now they're using Singer's pressure tactics to maximize the stock price. This is why open seating is going away. It's also why Southwest will probably drop the whole free carry-on bags policy. Singer is demanding it. More profit by charging bag fees. More profit in assigned seating. Singer wants Southwest to nickel and dime their customers the same way other airlines do now. This will, of course destroy the Southwest culture [crankyflier.com], making it just like any other carrier. But Singer doesn't care about that. He just wants more profits. And he has a history of going to extraordinary lengths to attack CEO's and board members of targeted companies, often at a very personal level, hiring third party "investigation teams" that are made up of ex-CIA, MI6, Mossad, etc, to ferret out embarrassing info and then release it to force his targets out. He also has powerful political connections. If you want to see what Southwest is up against (and why they'll probably lose and have their entire board replaced by Elliot's hand picked replacements), see this profile: Paul Singer, Doomsday Investor [newyorker.com].
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There are a couple of words you missed from your description of Singer. "short term".
All these "shareholder value" changes only bring short term boosts in shareholder value.
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At some point in the mid to late 20th century there was a fundamental shift in the way publicly traded companies worked. It used to be that these companies would do what was good for the company then everything changed and they now only do what's good for the share price.
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The primary thing I like about Southwest's system (or old system I guess) was that it made the gate more orderly. People sat in their seats until it was their turn to line up.
With the other carriers everyone just crowds around the gate until their boarding group is called, making it difficult to actually get in line when it's your turn or move about the gate area.
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"Back in the day"
Back in the day, you'd get to the gate and stand in line waiting for the gate agents to start handing out the cards for your flight. They were handed out in order, so every gate had a line 100 people long which clogged the walkways of the terminal. That was someone else's problem; Southwest didn't care.
"Southwest's "open seating" always had some serious drawbacks to go along with its advantages. Over time, they've whittled away the advantages"
What whittled away the advantages is increased l
What I want to know is ... (Score:1)
... do they still use data storage technology that mostly went obsolete in the previous century [interestin...eering.com]?
Well, at least they still serve peanuts. Wait, what's that? I'm gonna cry now. [cnn.com]
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So they've fixed all their computer issues?? (Score:2)
Re: So they've fixed all their computer issues?? (Score:1)
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The end of the miracle flights? (Score:5, Funny)
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Does this mean a reduction in the number of the curative miracle flight passengers, where those who requested a wheelchair and got early boarding (and the best seats), were able to walk off after the flight ended (it was a miracle!)?
There are no miracles. Those healings are merely the result of the little-known synergistic benefit of communally-enhanced/reprocessed respiration therapy combined with hypobaric pressure therapy. And maybe a touch of circadian disruption therapy. Um, and not-moving-for-hours therapy. Yeah; that's it.
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Jet way Jesus is forever
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southwest, we bring you closer to god.
Finally (Score:4, Informative)
I might consider flying SW now - open seating was the primary reason I've been avoiding them.
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I'm the opposite. To me, the open seating was a bonus. And especially, pick that exit row with extra legroom for no extra cost.
The other airlines now nickel-and-dime you with categories of seats that cost extra. That's NOT an improvement over Southwest's open seating.
Here's a radical idea (Score:2)
Yeah, probably going too far but better accommodating tall or wide passengers could be a good start. Whadaya think?
It's easy to know why (Score:3)
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Blatant abuse of the pre-boarding line. Take a look at some youtubes. A couple dozen able-bodied people lining up to pre-board only to jump the line on every flight. Ultimately ruining it for everyone.
I agree. Domestic US airlines need to do a much BETTER JOB of controlling access/use to their pre-boarding priviledge.
But then there is that "service pet" scam that also gets exploited by people that just want their pets to fly with them; no actual "service" need.
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Blatant abuse of the pre-boarding line. Take a look at some youtubes. A couple dozen able-bodied people lining up to pre-board only to jump the line on every flight. Ultimately ruining it for everyone.
I doubt this move is going to or was even intended to combat that.
US airlines need to start demanding some kind of proof of disability, same as they need to demonstrate some dependence on a service animal. This is how the rest of the world does it. You don't end up with able bodied people requesting assistance because it can be refused at the airport, conversely this discretion by staff on the ground can go the other way, a mate who broke his arm turned up with it in a cast unbeknownst to the staff, the
Always Terrible (Score:2)
All the systems suck, and Southwest's wasn't ever any better. There is no advantage or point to being on the plane sooner. Just load the plane back to front, window to aisle, with next to no exceptions. Hell, if they wanted to actually be efficient about the whole thing, they should design a new setup that allows planes to easily use two or more doors for boarding/deboarding. But efficiency is not on the radar for airlines and never has been.