Are all of the changes Southwest Airlines is making too much, too fast? Not for the passengers who have been largely negative on this like checked bag fees and basic economy restrictions, one thing after another taken away from customers with nothing really added that makes life better.
Here what I’m troubled by is whether they’ve taken on too many projects to quickly in order to actually pull them off without significant service disruptions and customer inconvenience. Enilria writes “I think this transition is going to be a bumpy ride.” That may understate matters significantly.
The guest host this week on Airlines Confidential was former American Airlines CIO Maya Leibman, who talked about all of the technology changes behind the scenes that have to happen:
- for paid seats across different aircraft seating configurations (even though they only operate 737s)
- the programming for bag fees – with standard pricing but you want to be able to change it; plus exceptions for elites and cardmembers; the data feed you need from Chase on cardmembers; plus refund processes when you accidentally charge someone who was entitled to a waiver
- all the airport signage on bags fly free that has to be removed, which has accumulated for years not just at gates but on jetbridges and in ticketing lobbies; literally finding everything and scrubbing references also to travel credits never expire.
- now they’re going to have to reconfigure all of their gate areas across the system, too, removing pilons.
And Southwest has never been a super tech-forward airline! That’s why their operation melted down at Christmas 2022 and couldn’t recover – their tech couldn’t track planes and crew and schedules couldn’t be rebuilt electronically. Airline staff were rebuilding the system by hand.
They’ve already been taking up IT resources to devalue Rapid Rewards points and reduce points-earning on the cheapest tickets, and still have to implement Basic Economy restrictions. They’re changing seat map layouts to accommodate additional legroom seating (which means taking away legroom from existing standard coach seats on 737-800 and MAX 8 aircraft).
Plus, they’ve been deeply engaged in IT projects to make their departure procedures more electronic, stop having to print out things, in order to hopefully speed up boarding at the same time they’ll be slowing it down with gate checked bags as passengers carry more items onboard the aircraft (and they’ve been slow to add larger overhead bins) and no longer have the incentive to board quickly to nab a better seat once on the plane.
Southwest Airlines is going to be spending a ton of money on this transition, in hopes of generating more revenue, even though they’ve said in the past their analysis shows that changes like the ones they’ve announced would be net negative for the business as they chase away customers. But they have new investor activist-appointed directors who have a gut sense that these things work, because they ‘worked’ at those directors’ former airlines, and management had to go along to save their jobs.
But have they fully considered the operational consequences of a ‘big bang’ making so many changes all at once? Do they have the capacity to actually implement everything on schedule? Or is Southwest going to be a mess to fly for a time – as they try to figure out charging for bags, charging for seats, whether tickets are fully changeable or not?
What a sh@#show. I’ve been professionally analyzing the most successful companies in America for 30 years and I’ve never seen success come from completely changing everything that made a company great let alone angering your most loyal and core customers in hopes of getting new customer. Hope is the enemy of all business people.
@ 1990 I agree that sharing and debating ideas is much better than violence (I say that based not only on common sense but as also a combat veteran in an area far, far away.) However, it seems that a segment of the political spectrum prefers violence regardless of whom it affects., the most recent example is Tesla. Vitriolic words and destroying property is not the way to win an argument unless you are going for scorched earth in which no one benefits.
WN, like I said it was a fun ride. Unlike Morris Air, MuseAir/TranStar, AirTran purchase was a horrendous mistake. Even Elliott can’t fix that dissimilar culture.
The Christmas meltdown was an employee sickout.p, not I.T.. The I.T. spin comes from their PR department, a blameless entity that can’t be held accountable. Go check their financials. SWA execs collected a combined $9.1M in bonuses despite the meltdown, only because they had good (marxist) ESG scores.
Like Bruce said, SWA has turned its back on everything that made it SWA, including the employees. Like Braniff, Eastern and PanAM, Southwest will also fall – and the gangsters at Elliot Investments will take their pound of flesh on the way out.
Herb is rolling over in his grave.