Southwest Airlines Announcing New Seats Tomorrow (and Maybe Something More Interesting)

by Gary Leff

Southwest tweeted a great tease of new seats.

Clearly visible on the tarp over the seat is the name “BE Aerospace” which tells me they’re probably going with something like this.

Now seeing this alone should actually make passengers happy. Anything but Recaro‘s slimline seats, right?

But turn these seats around to the back and we see:

So what do you think Southwest’s big announcement is?

About Gary Leff

Gary Leff is one of the foremost experts in the field of miles, points, and frequent business travel - a topic he has covered since 2002. Co-founder of frequent flyer community InsideFlyer.com, emcee of the Freddie Awards, and named one of the "World's Top Travel Experts" by Conde' Nast Traveler (2010-Present) Gary has been a guest on most major news media, profiled in several top print publications, and published broadly on the topic of consumer loyalty. More About Gary »

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Comments

  1. Hmmmmm…Maybe this ties in with an announcement of new routes? Like to Hawaii…these would make sense on longer flights.

    Thanks,

    Andy

  3. I can almost guarantee that you will find high-back literature pockets sans IFE screens on these seats, having seen one of the designs under evaluation at HQ last year. If we’re lucky, there will be outlets (or at least USB ports) and perhaps some sort of tablet holding mechanism since Southwest has been very big on the bring-your-own-device model.

  4. Southwest’s post-2012 interior, with its extra row of seats crammed in, changed its entire cabin from class leading to average or worse. Very tall people have abandoned Southwest since 2012 because they simply can’t fit into the reduced space. An Economy Plus offering is long overdue. Removing the extra row of seats would be even better for 99% of customers.

    The design of the seats is insignificant compared to the NUMBER of seats in the aircraft.

  8. @Phil

    Hey I can dream can’t I. Long term if they are flying longer routes, it may make sense on some planes to have an IFE system if they could get the numbers to work.

  9. I know what it is. That is the new, Southwest “First-Class” seating. They already have “business class” which are exactly the same seats, so they decided to go all the way and now they have “first class.”

    You get to board first.

  10. That’s a large video screen. The controller is also for video games. In-flight entertainment comes to Southwest.

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