For one day only – coinciding with Southwest Airlines eliminating open seating which is a key part of what made it unique – anyone submitting a selfie in an airline middle seat gets a $20 Subway gift card.
There are… a total of 737 gift cards available on January 27 (Southwest flies only Boeing 737s), it’s first-come first-served, and it’s open to anyone 18 years old or older in the U.S. Just submit a photo of yourself in an airplane middle seat (any airline) taken that day, and as long as it reasonably shows you between two seats with both armrests and seats on either side, you should get the gift card (if there are any left). Your face doesn’t have to be visible.
You register with name, e-mail address, date of birth and phone number, do SMS two-factor authentication, and upload the image. Gift cards get emailed after validation within 48 hours. They say they may check image metadata to confirm the date the photo was taken, or do a visual plausibility check if metadata isn’t available.
They’re calling the middle seat the “Sandwich Seat” “perhaps on a blue, red and yellow 737.”
Subway is hardly the first to reward you for being in the middle seat. For instance,
- Virgin Australia has its “Middle Seat Lottery” in 2022 and 2023, with weekly prizes for those who sat in a middle seat on a Virgin Australia domestic flight. They received about a quarter million entries for prizes like Tokyo flights and 250,000 Velocity frequent flyer points.
- Spirit Airlines offered 5,000 “Lucky Seat” miles to middle seat passengers.
So the middle seat can be better! Sometimes customers actually choose middle seats when there are aisles and windows open which seems insane, except there are hidden benefits to middle seats like moral rights to both armrests.
Southwest’s move to assigned seating is going to end all the game theory for keeping an open seat next to you – and end the catfishing trick where a woman asks a man seated in a row whether someone was sitting in the middle seat, and when invited to sit there she has her boyfriend sit down.
I’ve always chosen an aisle seat on any flight, and with SW I usually don’t care how far back I needed to go. Now row selection will depend on how they manage the boarding order in order to get overhead space.
That being said, SW has eliminated nonstops on my most travelled route so I’ll be flying it elsewhere.
@Kirk — Sounds ‘not great’ to me.
The destruction of the once great airline is almost complete. This next year will be a financial disaster for Southworst as millions of loyal customers take their business – and dollars – elsewhere. Next year they will file for bankrupcy.
This timing for this is perfect. If the megastorm hits as planned over the weekend through Monday, I suspect Tuesday will be a full airline meltdown day