Southwest Air is considering ditching unassigned seating

Southwest Airlines Co. may ditch open seating, a classic hallmark of its business model, to offer assigned spots and premium seats in a bid to appeal to a younger generation of travelers. The move arguably would be the largest change undertaken by the carrier since it began flying in 1971. 

“We are seriously studying customer preference around our seating and our cabin,” Chief Executive Officer Bob Jordan said in an interview Thursday. “We’ve been doing that for awhile — you have to be committed to understanding and meeting customer expectations.”

Jordan’s comments were a step up from last year, when the carrier acknowledged it was monitoring growing industrywide preference among travelers for premium products. But Chief Commercial Officer Ryan Green noted then that such things are often cyclical and the carrier would wait to see if the trend persisted.

Now Southwest is expected to announce a decision on seating changes and introduce “a whole series of initiatives” — including overnight red-eye flights — at an investor day Sept. 26. While the carrier was known early on as being firmly against tweaking its no-frills model, it did give up plastic boarding cards, changed its boarding process, expanded ticket sales beyond its own website, began actively seeking business travelers and added Wi-Fi and power to its planes over the years. 

But its aircraft are crowded now, with passengers often filling more than 90% of the seats compared with 60% to 70% in past years, and “customer expectations change over time,” Jordan said. The carrier is also considering how such a change would affect its flight operations. 

“There’s no decision,” he said. “The early results for both customers and for Southwest look really interesting. If data says this what customers want, this is good for demand, for Southwest, for shareholders, then I think you have your answer.” 

Southwest has studied seat assignments more than once in the past without making changes. The carrier also executed an in-depth review of diverting from its all-Boeing Co. aircraft model before deciding it would be too costly and add too much complexity to purchase planes from Airbus SE.