Southwest Airlines is getting set to completely overhaul its seating setup, with its first-ever assigned and extra-legroom seats officially launching next year. Even after the changes, though, passengers will still get an individual boarding number at check-in, the airline tells TPG. And, just as they do today, passengers will continue to line up at the gate, single-file, along its signature boarding area posts.
All things considered, Southwest’s future boarding process will look remarkably similar to the one-of-a-kind setup used today — a process executives last year said they hoped to use as a blueprint even as the airline shifts to assigned seating.
“Our customers really appreciate the calmness at the gate of lining up,” Ryan Green, the Southwest executive overseeing major changes at the airline, told TPG in an interview earlier this month.
“What they don’t like,” Green added, “is the anxiety of, ‘What seat am I going to get on board?’ So we’re hoping to solve both of those.”
Quick take: Southwest Airlines will end open seating: What you need to know
A unique way to board the plane
Under Southwest’s current boarding procedures, passengers are assigned lettered groups and numerical boarding positions within that group.
Just before departure, they line up along boarding area stanchions before proceeding onto the jet bridge, one at a time.
It’s a far different boarding setup than the more traditional “groups” used by other carriers — and a process that, Southwest says, prevents the sort of boarding area crowding (sometimes dubbed “gate lice“) other airlines have sought to eliminate, most recently with new technology to catch line-cutters at one major U.S. carrier.
“It can be chaotic at other airlines,” Southwest chief operating officer Andrew Watterson said, speaking with TPG alongside Green last week in Washington.
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“The fact that it’s so orderly [at Southwest],” Watterson added, “we do get big kudos from our customers.”
Changes needed, though
Yet, there was a reality in Southwest’s unique boarding process: It was devised specifically for a half-century-old open-seating policy the airline now plans to wind down a year from now.
The same could be said about the EarlyBird check-in and Upgraded Boarding optional add-on products the Dallas-based carrier offers passengers as a way to get an earlier spot in line — and by extension a better seat.
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Southwest is now in the process of rethinking its existing boarding process to fit its future assigned-seating reality, Green said. The airline, he confirmed, plans to award better boarding positions to A-List elite status members, as well as travelers who select higher-priced tickets and its new extra-legroom seats.
“Our best customers and customers that fly us most frequently, I think customers who buy our higher fare tier products, they’ll be first to board,” he said.
Of course, going forward, access to overhead bin space will be the draw of boarding early on Southwest, since seat assignments will be locked in ahead of time.
No more 24-hour check-in anxiety
Perhaps the most welcome change the new (but similar) boarding process will bring, executives promise: the end of setting an alarm for 24 hours before departure to secure an earlier spot.
More Rapid Rewards changes on horizon
Meanwhile, the airline is hard at work devising additional future adjustments to its Rapid Rewards loyalty program to account for its big cabin changes.
Southwest has already said A-List Preferred elite members will be able to select extra-legroom seats for free at booking — with free access for A-List members within 48 hours of departure.
Up next: Expect to hear more, soon, about how Southwest will evolve its suite of cobranded credit cards to its new reality.
“Today, with different cards, you get boarding benefits with EarlyBird and Upgraded Boarding,” Green said. “We’ll swap — switch that over to seating benefits, and customers are going to be really excited about it. I think it’s going to make the card more valuable.”
Read more: Southwest passengers will start noticing big changes long before assigned seating starts
What about lounges?
It’d be hard to ever imagine “Southwest Airlines and airport lounge” in the same sentence.
Then again, the same could have been said for JetBlue just a few years ago. Yet, its first-ever club will debut later this year in New York.
Are lounges something Southwest would ever consider?
“We talk to customers all the time about stuff we have and don’t have,” Watterson said, pointing to exhaustive focus group-esque research the company did before moving forward with assigned seats, and deciding to keep its “two bags fly free” policy in place.
“The fact that we ask about it is not a signal that anything’s coming,” Watterson added. “It is our responsibility to keep tabs on what our customers want.”
The duo of executives fielded similar questions last fall in Dallas, at the airline’s annual investor day, and acknowledged the notion of adding lounges to its repertoire are “a source of continuous debate,” as Green put it.
“They are expensive,” he said then — but also declined to rule out the move for the future.
“I think there’s a way in which we probably would implement a lounge, if we decided to do that, that may be different than an American Express Centurion Lounge,” Green said in September.
It’s worth noting, Southwest also acknowledged studying the possibility of adding a bona fide domestic first-class cabin on its planes before ultimately landing last year on moving forward with simpler extra-legroom rows, executives shared last year.
Going global … sort of
What do assigned seats, extra-legroom seats and a new partnership with Icelandair have in common?
“We want to broaden the appeal of Southwest Airlines,” Green told me. “[It] is giving customers an additional choice, an additional way to ‘buy Southwest.'”
That work will begin in earnest over the next few weeks, as the carrier’s first international partnership with Icelandair goes live.
It’ll be a limited tie-up at first; Rapid Rewards members will have to wait until next year to start purchasing Icelandair flights through Southwest’s booking channels — not to mention earning or redeeming points on flights to Reykjavik and Europe.
But that is, indeed, the long-term vision — and it’s the vision for the second international partner Southwest hopes to announce before the end of this year.
Executives acknowledged the airline is in talks with both transatlantic and transpacific airlines, with a focus on offering Rapid Rewards loyalists connectivity to as much of the globe as possible.
It’s a fairly remarkable shift for an airline long known for its heavily domestic U.S. footprint.
Southwest has steadily grown its international footprint across Mexico, Latin America and the Caribbean since launching its first flights beyond the U.S. in 2014, but it has yet to sell tickets on high-profile transatlantic or transpacific routes.
Yet, with unrelenting interest in international travel among customers, and loyalty (and credit card) programs proving incredibly lucrative for carriers, it’s a move Southwest sees as a logical step following recent years’ lackluster profits and pressure in 2024 from a group of activist investors.
“Yes, this is about the loyalty program. The loyalty program’s about the airline,” Watterson said. “So, it all works together and it makes for a wonderful offering.”
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