I’m the perfect candidate to be a customer of the ‘new’ Southwest.
- 41% of the seats out of my home airport in Austin are flown by Southwest. They offer a lot of non-stop service!
- I rarely check bags, so it doesn’t much matter that they now charge separately for checked bags.
- I’ll even pay for extra legroom seats, but I can book a preferred seat and get extra legroom free within 48 hours of departure using my Southwest A-List status (that comes from spending $75,000 on Chase’s Reserve card).
In fact, my most frequent destination is D.C. and Southwest has a legal monopoly on non-stop service between close-in National airport in D.C. and Austin. I very badly want to take Southwest’s non-stop as much as I can (though the outbound from Austin is very poorly timed – a 1 p.m. flight does me very little good).
Flying home from D.C. at 5 p.m. is perfect, and if the flight’s on time I might even see my daughter before she’s asleep (but I don’t really want her stretching to stay up for me).
The thing that keeps me from booking Southwest isn’t the seat fees or the bag fees, the stricter expiration of flight credits (I’ll use a basic economy flight credit within 6 months) or the devaluation of Rapid Rewards. It’s that on a given flight there’s a strong probability I’m sacrificing hours of productivity.
- I’ll buy an extra legroom seat for more laptop space to work
- But the wifi probably won’t be usable on the flight.
Southwest has garbage Anuvu connectivity on most of its fleet. For the last 3 years they’ve been installing ViaSat on new delivery Boeing 737 MAX 8 aircraft. So about 40% of their MAX 8s have ViaSat. The D.C. – Austin route is on a MAX 8!
Now that wifi is free on Southwest demand is off the charts. Performance was poor when they were charging $8. At free it’s frequently unusable. That’s going to be almost a given if you get a non-ViaSat aircraft. And even if you’re on a 737 MAX route you have less than a 50% chance of ViaSat.
When then-US Airways President Scott Kirby saw that people were booking away from his airline due to lack of wifi back around 2012, he finally greenlit installation of the old Gogo air-to-ground system. I – and many others – book away from Southwest because of their poor wifi, which has gotten worse with free. And if I do fly Southwest, I question whether paying up ancillary revenue makes any sense since I don’t know that I’ll be able to leverage it to meet my needs.
Forget lounges, to meet customer needs (which is what Southwest claims they’re trying to do) they need functional wifi. That means Starlink. But if they really want to cheap out, they could go with a great early deal from Amazon (since that system won’t be commercially ready for a couple of years) or backfill ViaSat as airlines move to faster, low earth orbit satellite systems.
I even benefit much of the time from Southwest’s new boarding, since I don’t have to line up 30 minutes prior to departure and I can still board early enough to get overhead bin space. I actually want to be a Southwest customer. They just haven’t realized what it means to align their product with the needs of ‘premium passengers’ who will buy up in their new model.
so help us understand in your “hierarchy” of preferences where WiFi really falls.
Do you really not fly WN home from DCA because they don’t have reliable high speed WiFI or do you do it and then moan about what you “could have had” – except you really don’t have any alternatives because of the stated monopoly that you say they have?
Do you not see that the same argument can be made about most customer service amenities and it is true that it is connecting passengers w/ no nonstop options are who are up for grabs and most most likely to be swayed by high speed internet?
and it is beyond notable that Viasat is good enough on WN despite the fact that you swoon over Starlink; 3 out of the big 4 have or will have partial or complete Viasat-based domestic internet so how is the dial really going to be moved if the majority of passengers have to “endure it”?
and finally, inflight internet is a relatively new feature. Were you really just unproductive for all the time you flew before? and you do realize that computers do work even if they are not connected to the internet? Just think of all the writing and proofreading of articles in process you can do while you are offline.
If airlines make wifi free they’re going to need to spend money to upgrade the bandwidth to support a near plane full of people streaming their own content. So that’s the rub-free wifi but doesn’t work very well.
Actually, the last couple of times I flew SWA, which is at least 2xs/month, and the wifi worked very well.
I would be the perfect customer for WN
if …… they had a premium cabin .
but what’s the sign up bonus on the Citi Strata card?!?!?!?!?!
This really has been ‘WiFi week’ on the various blogs, hasn’t it?
Gary’s earlier ‘hot take’ on American’s soon-to-be-offering free WiFi was that of disappointment because he’d rather pay for it, so that he gets ‘reliable’ WiFi, even if it means denying the ‘peasants’ their WiFi…
@Tim Dunn — Delta and jetBlue lead the way on free WiFi for members (on most aircraft), and they deserve applause for that. United, American, and the others are still catching up. All of them should have it in 2025, if not at least by 2030, LCCs included.
Yeah. The free WiFi is very slow. It’s only good for chatting. No youtube. I just flew from AUS to PHX a couple of days ago.