pilotmww
Going to be interesting to see how this plays out. These changes will eliminate what is still unique about Southwest and make them just like any other airline.
Going to be interesting to see how this plays out. These changes will eliminate what is still unique about Southwest and make them just like any other airline.
Seen from afar it seems this is done by management who lack “feel” for the spirit of the business. It’s much easier to shatter sympathy for a business than to to (re)gain it. From a (cabin) crew and speed perspective it would make much more sense to charge for hand luggage and keep checked luggage free. Everyone trying to cram everything into overhead bins not designed for the amount of hand luggage brought by a lot more passengers than the plane was initially intended for makes for a miserable travelling experience and longer boarding and de-boarding times.
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All ticket pricing should be based on weight, both human and what ever else you want to bring with you. It is the only fair way to do it. All flying costs are essentially based on weight. Ticket pricing should reflect the same.
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Spot on Siegfried, not only from the cabin crew perspective but also from the passenger perspective. But it’s become a moot point for me. I’ve been voting with my wheels for the past 5 years.
Will indeed be interesting to see what happens. It is absolutely now “Just Another Airline”. And their other conditions and fees have also complicated the fare selection to take the previous comfort out of a ticket purchase. SWA is all I’ve flown for years. Will now begin to do bargain shopping for fares.
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“We have tremendous opportunity to meet current and future customer needs, attract new customer segments we don’t compete for today, and return to the levels of profitability that both we and our shareholders expect.”
It’s not clear to me how beginning to charge for checked baggage will help SWA “attract new customer segments”. Have people been avoiding SWA because they don’t have to pay to check their luggage? Seems obvious to me the only reason is to improve corporate/shareholder profit, at the potential risk of losing previously faithful customers — it’s the American way.
That’s exactly what we need, the shotgun to kill the fly. Nothing like implementing a complicated and nitpicky detail to the reservations process. If we didn’t need it now, we don’t need it later.
I think the airlines haven’t implemented that in 100 years of air travel because it is a ridiculous idea.
Fortunately, the marketing is really easy to fix: “Bags Fly Fee!”
Private equity firms, leveraged buy-outs, hostile takeovers, ‘active’ investors pushing for short-term profits over long term gains…Capitalism is an inherently destructive system. Not saying there is anything better out there, but a lot of good companies and good people will inevitably get hurt in the process.
Really sad to see a good and successful business model get trashed by investor interference. The things that made Southwest unique were valued by loyal customers who appreciated quicker boarding, simpler ticket pricing and easy-to-understand fare structure. Now they’re about to be another Spirit or Frontier except with blue-painted airplanes. Not what the market needed…
SWA competition put up a combined 5.5 billion in revenue last year on luggage charges alone. It’s about time SWA stopped leaving that money on the table.
Sure, SWA may be becoming just another option, but an option nonetheless and likely still filling planes on its routes in the 1-3 years from now when the collective customer base forgets about this change altogether and still pays for the checked bag, giving SWA a much needed revenue boost.
It’s about time they make big changes to get the margins back into the double digits, and I think this will help drastically.
If charging extra for every little item that Southwest does not charge extra for now is such a good thing, how come the king of extra charges, Spirit airlines is going through bankruptcy with a distinct possibility of going belly up?