Southwest Airlines Employee’s Savage Response to Passenger’s Sweet Talk [Roundup]

by Gary Leff

News and notes from around the interweb:

  • Southwest:

  • When I interviewed the CEO of BeOnd airlines, the all-business class startup based in the Maldives, I laid out the seasonality problems. They can fill planes at high fares potentially November through March, but what about the rest of the year? He suggested they would look at another (counter-seasonal) destination.

    He also said they’d focus on serving European and Mideast customers, so that it could be the same customers they bring to the Maldives and to another destination, and also that they’d eschew widebodies due to complexity and that they’d need to fill too many business class seats. So I was semi-surprised to hear that somewhere in the Caribbean is possible in the next 18-36 months.


    Credit: BeOnd

  • The ‘Texas Economic Forum’ at Southern Methodist University’s Cox School of Business was an absolute blast, and Scott McCartney is always such a pleasure to listen to.

  • It seems like this is a pretty core element of the experience you’re buying, warranting more than just a modest offer of miles or future flight credit…

  • Plenty of airports have been ripping out moving walkways, of course. The usual reason is that passengers who get on them don’t drop into retail shops.

  • $4,500 per night ranch in Montana redeemable for 130,000 Hilton points

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. As for the Airport Scales issue, these are actually checked on a regular basis by the local Bureau of Weights and Measures (same folks that check Retail/Industrial Scales and Gas Pumps). That said, digital scales always entail load cells, and these can drift. If you find yourself with Baggage that weighed OK at home but was slightly over the limit at the Airport, the best thing to do is to simply ask if they could double-check it on another scale 4′ over.

  3. In the past when the airport scales have read higher than what my digital hand scale reads, I have simply taken my bags off of the scale and asked the agent to zero the scale. Most of the times a few clicks of the keyboard gets the scale zeroed. Then I put my bags back on and they weigh exactly what they weighed at home after they were fully packed. If the airport scales are off they mostly show more weight but once in a while show less weight per my experience. I carry my digital hand scale in my pocket for reference if needed. It corresponds almost exactly to my doctor’s office grade balance beam scale I have at home that I spent several hundred dollars on.

  4. McCartney? Isn’t he the guy who completely misanalyzed all those bogus Ideaworks “studies”?

    And never was able to comprehend how Southwest points fundamentally differed from miles? And insulted me when I pointed out his manifold errors?

    I’d not listen to a thing he has to say, the clown.

  5. Holy crap Gary has lost a lot of weight. I’d say congrats except my guess it’s Ozempic (or something like it) vs lifestyle changes, so that probably doesn’t merit kudos. With that and being fully boosted, Gary is at the forefront of experimental therapy volunteerism for our Big Pharma overlords.

  7. @jns … You have too many scales . If you can hold all your bags up with a one-handed-held scale , you can schlep your bags as a weight-lifting exercise . If you have a doctor’s scale which you spent several hundred dollars , you can carry the heavy scale around as a weight-lifting exercise .

  10. They have taken moving sidewalks out of places at O’Hare that have no retail presence. I think they don’t want to/ can’t maintain them, like the escalators at the store that used to be known as Marshall Fields. Plus moving sidewalks go against modern MBA theory that you don’t spend money when you can get your customer to do the work, in this case walking.

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