DALLAS – In gleaming white skirts and sneakers, a group of off-duty Southwest Airlines flight attendants lined up near a boarding gate at Dallas Love Field – not with roller bags, but pompoms. They had gathered Tuesday to celebrate a milestone in company history.<\/p>\n
\u201cAssigned seats! What a treat! Southwest spirit can\u2019t be beat!\u201d the cheerleaders beamed.<\/p>\n
Subscribe to The Post Most newsletter for the most important and interesting stories from The Washington Post. <\/a><\/p>\n As they repeated their message, a gate agent performed a chant of his own.<\/p>\n \u201cGroup seven! Group seven!\u201d<\/p>\n It was the first day that Southwest assigned seats, ending a more than 50-year policy that allowed passengers to pick their seat as they boarded.<\/p>\n Instead of lining up in the old assigned boarding positions, passengers were called in eight numbered groups, plus some VIPs, ranging in hierarchy from A-List Preferred to Basic fares. Tuesday also marked the launch of different fare bundles and seat types, including \u201cExtra Legroom,\u201d \u201cPreferred\u201d and \u201cStandard.\u201d<\/p>\n The change from open seating, which has been years in the making, quickly drew strong reactions.<\/p>\n \u201cI got on the plane this morning, I was so frustrated,\u201d longtime Southwest customer Alec Robinson said.<\/p>\n Preboarding passengers on his flight filled up the overhead bins at the front of the plane, not near their seats, causing a slowdown as later groups hunted for space.<\/p>\n \u201cI was like, \u2018I\u2019m never flying Southwest again,’ and I\u2019ve got three more flights,\u201d said Robinson, who is based in Denver.<\/p>\n But a few gates over, Mari Ortiz said she was glad to see open seating go.<\/p>\n \u201cEspecially if you travel with older people and kids, it was ridiculous,\u201d said Ortiz, who lives in San Juan, Puerto Rico.<\/p>\n She recalled a Southwest flight to Orlando when she was traveling as a group of three moms and a dozen kids. Some passengers wouldn\u2019t move to make room for the parents to sit with the children.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was stupid not being able to sit with your family and having kids everywhere,\u201d she said. \u201cIt was a mess.\u201d<\/p>\n Whether travelers see it as another example of Southwest selling out, or an overdue fix, it\u2019s indisputably the end of an era.<\/p>\n – – –<\/p>\n Full rows on a mostly empty flight<\/p>\n Some airports have already removed the signature boarding position columns that used to be bolted into the ground at Southwest gates.<\/p>\n But at Reagan National Airport, the columns still stood like a Southwest Stonehenge. Their former markings, from the premiere A1-A15 to the dregs of C50-C61, were now blank.<\/p>\n To see the new seating model first hand, I grabbed the first flight of the day from Washington to Dallas on Tuesday morning. As passengers struggled to keep their eyes open before dawn, airline staff were chipper.<\/p>\n \u201cYay, our first day of assigned seating!\u201d a gate agent said over a loudspeaker in National\u2019s Terminal 1.<\/p>\n Over the loudspeaker, airline staff asked travelers not to gather at the gate until their boarding group was called, and that priority boarding was available for purchase through an agent or the Southwest app.<\/p>\n The process began on time at 5:30 a.m., starting with preboarding for customers with disabilities and families with children under 2. Active-duty members of the U.S. military were invited to board next in the \u201cPriority Boarding Group,\u201d which included people who paid for early boarding. Then came the eight groups that depend on fare type and loyalty status.<\/p>\n I had not bought a premium fare and do not have a Southwest credit card, but I was still called with Group 4. Maybe because I\u2019ve been a Rapid Rewards member for years, but I couldn\u2019t say for sure.<\/p>\n To avoid extra fees, I did not select a seat when I bought my ticket. When it was time to check in online, I could move seats for free. It looked like I had my own row, so I kept my automatic assignment.<\/p>\n But shortly after I buckled into 17A, my row filled up. So did the row across the aisle. We craned our necks to survey the plane; it was mostly empty.<\/p>\n The flight attendant tried to move us using the new computer system before takeoff, but the program was glitching. I wasn\u2019t showing up in the system at all, and the other seats were incorrectly marked full.<\/p>\n \u201cOnce I figure out how to work it, I will move you guys,\u201d the flight attendant said, apologizing. \u201cIt\u2019s not working how it\u2019s supposed to.\u201d<\/p>\n It took 20 minutes of tinkering with the new software, but the flight attendant was able to spread us throughout the cabin – according to our fare. There were no free upgrades to the mostly-empty More Legroom seats. I got my own row after all.<\/p>\n My flight home to D.C. felt more typical. The plane was packed to the gills, complete with crying babies and fussy passengers.<\/p>\n \u201cBoarding took, like, 45 minutes,\u201d my row neighbor lamented.<\/p>\n \u201cGonna be a long flight,\u201d another replied.<\/p>\n If boarding was delayed because of assigned seating, I didn\u2019t mind. If it hadn\u2019t been for my designated window seat, I probably would have been doomed to a middle seat because of my middling status.<\/p>\n – – –<\/p>\n Race to check in first \u2018was a cult\u2019<\/p>\n Southwest first announced its assigned seating intentions in 2024.<\/p>\n In an earnings call that year, CEO Robert E. Jordan said company research showed 80 percent of customers, and 86 percent of potential customers, preferred assigned seats over their open model.<\/p>\n \u201cFurther, when a customer defects from Southwest to one of our competitors, our open seating policy is cited as the number one reason why,\u201d Jordan continued.<\/p>\n To Mike Boyd, aviation consultant and president of Boyd Group International, Southwest\u2019s open seating made more sense in the early days of the airline when flights were short and rarely full.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen you\u2019re getting on an airplane flying from Dallas to Lubbock, that\u2019s one thing,\u201d Boyd said. \u201cBut now that they\u2019re offering long haul flights like Hawaii, I don\u2019t want to potluck my seat if I\u2019m going all the way to Honolulu.\u201d<\/p>\n Also unlike the early days of the airline – which took its first flight in 1971 from Dallas Love Field – a large number of Southwest customers now travel with connecting flights. Boyd said oftentimes, this does not bode well for your seating prospects.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen you get to Chicago Midway, and it\u2019s a 45-minute connection, you\u2019re sitting in the middle seat going to L.A.,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n But open seating persisted, and it had fans and critics. Some people complained passengers abused the system, holding seats for phantom travel companions, and enabled the \u201cjetway Jesus\u201d grift in which some travelers allegedly fake wheelchair requirements to get priority boarding.<\/p>\n Others improved their chances of getting a good spot through the frequent-flier program, or gaming Southwest\u2019s unique boarding process.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was a cult,\u201d Boyd said. \u201cAt midnight before the day of your flight, everybody\u2019s online trying to get a higher boarding number \u2026 that\u2019s over with now.\u201d<\/p>\n Jordan, the Southwest CEO, has said that offering premium seating options was a significant opportunity \u201cto monetize the cabin more effectively.\u201d<\/p>\n Last year, the airline also started charging bag fees, got rid of a refund system that accommodated plus-size passengers and tightened its flexible flight change policy.<\/p>\n The latter went into effect last year, \u201cand I still don\u2019t really understand it,\u201d Jessica Ray, who\u2019s been a Southwest customer since childhood, said in a phone interview. \u201cIt\u2019s confusing and it\u2019s very clearly like them trying to entice you to buy a higher fare for more money, of course – which is what every other airline does.\u201d<\/p>\n Robert Mann, president of aviation consulting firm R.W. Mann & Co., said it\u2019s industry standard for airlines to \u201crely on a lot of different revenue sources,\u201d from branded credit cards to charging for ancillary services such as seat selection. The changes at Southwest \u201cjust makes them more like the other guys,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n While the new fees and belt-tightening may turn off longtime loyalists like Ray, Mann said it\u2019s a necessary evolution.<\/p>\n Now that they\u2019re competing with other legacy airlines, \u201cthe generation in which Southwest was quirky, different and low-cost is long ago,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Still, Mann said the airline\u2019s continued success will ultimately come down to one factor.<\/p>\n \u201cDo you run the airline reliably?\u201d he said. \u201cBecause that\u2019s what causes the customers to come back or not.\u201d<\/p>\n Related Content<\/p>\n America\u2019s oldest warship, sunk in 1776, is getting a 250th-birthday makeover <\/a><\/p>\n