Southwest Airlines is revamping its product with extra legroom seats, less legroom in back of the aircraft, redeye flying and partnerships with other airlines.
We can expect to see planes reconfigured (50-100 aircraft per month) to offer extra legroom seating throughout 2025. This will mean less legroom, though still more than at United, Delta and American, for regular coach. They expect to make seats assignable for early 2026 flying beginning in mid-2025.
Assigned seats changes the experience for elite frequent flyers.
- A-List and A-List Preferred elite customers will gain access to free seat assignments with extra legroom seats available to A-List Preferred at booking, and to A-List 48 hours prior to departure.
- Priority boarding remains a benefit, but it’s a lot less important when that doesn’t dictate what seat you’ll be in. And since the airline is keeping free checked bags, you don’t need to board early most of the time the way you do on competitors just to get overhead bin space. So priority boarding becomes less important as a benefit – precisely because Southwest will become more respectful of customer time.
- Points will become more useful as they partner with other airlines. Icelandair will come online in 2025, and so will a second partner. Icelandair will come with redemptions to Europe. That should make co-brand credit card spend more attractive.
With premium extra legroom seats, the distinction to understand is that anyone on the same reservation as an elite member gets their benefits. This means that A-List Preferred get premium seats at booking for themselves and for trip companions. Similarly, companions of a Companion Pass holder are treated the same as the customer buying the regular fare ticket.
However any purchased benefit applies onto the passenger purchasing it. So an A-List customer buying a premium seat at booking doesn’t get a free premium seat for companions.
Assigned seating is going to change credit card benefits, for instance reimbursement of A1-15 early boarding charges won’t be relevant any longer so that benefit presumably gets replaced. They’ll share details of card benefits changes “in early 2025.”
Premium seats at time of booking, including for companions on the same reservation, means that A-List Preferred will finally be differentiated in a meaningful way from base A-List status.
Glad to see SW getting some airline partners. I love Iceland Air but am a little confused. Currently Iceland Air has a partnership with Alaska (very loose and no interline but can redeem Saga points for flights on Alaska). Do you know if that will continue? Also, any idea if the partnership with Iceland Air will be similar to the very loose arrangement with Alaska or if it is more a true partnership like the major airline alliances have?
That drawn out timeline just to respace aircraft rows does not strike me as SWA willing to move expeditiously to improve performance. Not that I think this is the golden turnaround ticket for them anyway.
This seems to imply that A-List people will now need to furiously check-in at T-24 or whenever (once again) if they want extra-legroom seats. Or will upgrades happen automatically like at the legacy airlines?
Wow – it may be just me but I read the details and my first thought was this is the rebirth of TED by United .It sounds exactly the same . Still no premium cabin or premium service level . So , it appears that they are sticking with Business Select fares and offering a slightly more legroom coach seat and 1 free drink – these fares often seem to be equivalent to the premium class fares in the competition . Heck , even NK and F9 realized that some sort of premium cabin experience is necessary to attract premium revenue . I don’t think today’ s announcement moves the needle enough to make a significant impact on revenue or earnings . For the sake of WN employees and shareholders, I hope I am wrong . WN is still a non starter for me .
Should not have altered the boarding process but concentrated on making Hugh revenue by charging for bags! Alot of frequent flyers such as myself rarely check bags but we’re more involved with their boarding system as I was always able to get an aisle seat which I need for health reasons!