Hailed by some as egalitarian but decried by others as a cattle call, the open boarding process at Southwest Airlines is on the way out. The Dallas-based carrier on Thursday said that it will soon offer assigned seats for the first time systemwide in its 53-year history.
In a barrage of corporate jargon, Southwest called the change a “product evolution,” one of many “transformational commercial initiatives” aimed at “driving shareholder value” and improving “operational efficiency.” The bottom line? The airline decided it can make more money with assigned seats than without.
For many customers, open seating was the last notable difference between Southwest and its competitors, including crosstown rival American Airlines and longtime competitor United Airlines. Southwest has come to resemble those competitors by flying bigger planes, such as Boeing’s 737 MAX series, and traveling longer distances, including to international destinations. The average trip in its early days was 250 miles. In recent years, that’s 750 miles. Open seating was just about the last hint of Southwest as a maverick that did things its way, whether Wall Street liked it or not.
The airline, which has been studying prebooked seats since the fall of 2023, says surveys have found that 80 percent of its current passengers would prefer to choose a seat in advance. Another 86 percent of fliers who avoid Southwest say they do so because they can’t prebook seats.
Those findings represent a marked change from 2007, when Southwest previously spent months pondering a move to assigned seats. At that time, most of its passengers preferred open seating, and the airline determined that a slightly modified approach got everybody on the plane more efficiently. So Southwest introduced stanchions at the gate where passengers would line up to board in assigned A, B, and C groups. That change was spearheaded by Bob Jordan, who’s now Southwest’s CEO, and it likely put him on the path to lead the company, as he and I discussed in 2022.
In announcing this week’s embrace of assigned seating, Jordan didn’t argue that the shift would yield faster boarding. He said it would be more profitable—worth more than the $1 billion Southwest derives annually from its Early Bird Check-in fees charged to passengers who want to be among the first to board. Jordan is almost certainly right about that. Airlines have developed plenty of new revenue streams in recent years by charging for various preselected seats, including those with specific cabin positions and those with more spacious legroom.
Southwest hasn’t said exactly when assigned seating will begin, but it plans to announce more details this September. It has said, however, that it plans to retrofit its cabins—much as its competitors have—to create a section of seats with additional legroom. That represents another milestone: Throughout its history, the airline has—proudly—offered only one class of service. Southwest leadership has long maintained that by providing a single class of service, on a single type of plane (the Boeing 737), and offering no frills, such as serving meals, it could keep its costs low.
But in recent years, as industry analyst and former American Airlines executive Bob Mann has told me, Southwest has seen costs creep up. Investors have taken notice. In June, activist shareholder group Elliott Investment Management disclosed that it has taken a $1.9 billion stake in the airline. Elliott has called for Jordan’s ouster and other management changes. (Jordan told CNBC on Thursday the decision to move to assigned seating predates Elliott’s public pronouncements.)
Investor pressure may grow given that Southwest’s profits in the second quarter of this year were down 46 percent compared to the same quarter of 2023—despite all-time record revenue. Costs still need to be brought down, Jordan told CNBC, but boosting revenue through paid seat assignments can’t hurt profitability either. That is, unless the customers who like open seating refuse to fly on Southwest, which seems doubtful given that no other major airline offers the option.
The airline’s cofounder and legendary longtime CEO, the late Herb Kelleher, once told me that he wanted passengers to get off a Southwest plane feeling that they’d had a memorable experience. “That’s the hardest thing for competitors to copy,” he said. “They can get all the hardware. I mean, Boeing will sell them the planes. But it’s the software, so to speak, that’s hard to imitate.”
Southwest certainly delivered a memorable experience the first time I flew it, in the late nineties. My girlfriend and I were taking a trip from Dallas to San Antonio, where I was about to propose to her. I had no idea how to handle what was then a very open boarding system at Love Field. Before the days of the A, B, and C groups, jostling to get on the plane was entirely first-come, first-served.
I was among the last aboard an old 737-200 jet. Those models had a couple of sections of “club seating.” These were six seats grouped together—three facing the front of the airplane and three facing the rear. These were designed as conversation pods for groups traveling together. But with Southwest’s open seating, strangers might easily end up face-to-face.
My soon-to-be fiancée and I ended up in club seats, facing the rear. Across from us was a smartly dressed, pearl-wearing, gray-haired woman in her sixties. Next to her was a disheveled blond-haired man in his twenties. We assumed they were mother and son. Until, about ten minutes after takeoff, they started making out for the duration of the flight. Hot and heavy. We tried to look anywhere but straight at them. One of them crawled on the other’s lap at one point.
To be sure, when the last of those 737-200s exited Southwest’s fleet in 2005, the possibility of that specific form of in-flight entertainment disappeared. But the seeming Russian roulette of where you might have to sit each time you fly the airline has endured. Assigned seating will spell the end of that, but does it spell the end of Southwest Airlines as we’ve known it? Is the airline that launched with hot pants, go-go boots, and “love potions” now truly no different than the other major carriers?
Maybe not. Checked bags still “fly free,” a policy the airline still appears committed to, despite the $6.8 billion the industry collected for such fees in 2022. Although times have changed since its first flight took off from Love Field in 1971, when Southwest called itself “the love airline,” Southwest’s ticker symbol is still “LUV” and its livery features hearts on the bellies of its planes. And no other airline can boast of remaining profitable every year from 1973 until today—excluding 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic cratered air travel.
Ultimately the loss of open seating doesn’t figure to matter any more than when Southwest moved on from putting hot pants on its flight attendants or giving away booze. Today’s airline industry is a commodity business. Want to fly somewhere? Customers choose based on price, schedule, and maybe whichever loyalty program they’ve amassed miles with. So long as Southwest can match its competitors on those factors—even if it becomes indistinguishable from the airlines its flamboyant leaders, like Kelleher, once would have derided—plenty of passengers are still likely to choose Southwest when they “wanna get away.”
