Southwest Airlines saves a lot of money on wheelchairs, now that they have assigned seats. Until late January, a wheelchair meant early boarding, and boarding early with open seating meant you could secure the best seats. As a result, Southwest had some of the highest wheelchair costs in the entire world airline industry.
Seriously @SouthwestAir? There are more than 25 pre-boarders on my LAS-AUS flight. Just because you get a C on your boarding group shouldn’t mean you can cut the line. pic.twitter.com/ni0RGVPdq4
— Steve Stauning (@SteveStauning) November 15, 2025
It’s remarkable how many Southwest Airlines passengers have recovered from their physical ailments since the change in seating policy on January 27th. It used to be that people who had real needs couldn’t get wheelchairs or had long waits because people using them for airport priority took up all the wheelchairs. Now they’re widely available. Funny how that happened when the benefit shrunk from requesting assistance.
Jetway Jesus is officially dead …
by
u/EveningManager3782 in
SouthwestAirlines
It turns out, though, that Southwest still has a wheelchair problem, and that requesting a wheelchair can still get you the best seats for free even though Southwest now assigns and charges for seats.
After explaining why Southwest doesn’t want to add 5 minutes to boarding time, boarding 35 minutes before departure, because that just pads time and bakes in the efficiency of running late, Southwest Airlines Chief Operating Officer Andrew Watterson explained the problem that the airline now faces with wheelchairs on The Air Show.
[Y]ou might say, “Well, Andrew, I thought we’re supposed to have fewer wheelchairs.” And it’s true. We have fewer wheelchairs than we did before. But before, when someone was in a wheelchair, under open seating they would generally be in the front of the cabin, and so it was a shorter process.
Now, with assigned seats, the wheelchairs are seated throughout the cabin, so there’s more process time to bring them further back in the cabin.
Now, we do have blocks of seats. We don’t let every seat be purchased or reserved in advance, and those are being underutilized. So what we’re doing is we’re having our call centers outbound-call customers and see if they would be interested in moving up in the cabin to these blocks.
Since Southwest charges for seats now, wheelchair passengers don’t automatically end up at the front of the plane taking up the best seats. And this means boarding and deplaning them takes longer. So Southwest Airlines is proactively calling people with wheelchair requests in their reservations to ask them to take the front extra legroom premium seats for free!
It turns out that requesting a wheelchair still is a hack to the best deal at Southwest Airlines now, even after the end of open seating. It’s just that most people haven’t figured this out, so there are fewer wheelchair requests now than there used to be.
By the way I think I’d request a wheelchair if they were all like these at Singapore Changi airport.
While everyone’s arguing about the long lines of wheelchairs at some US airport for India flights, here’s what I saw at Changi the other day.
These little SATS autonomous wheelchairs just roll around Terminal 3 on their own. Sensors, fixed routes to the gate, seatbelt has to be… pic.twitter.com/bEJM3MWHLI
— Fahad Naim (@Fahadnaimb) August 22, 2026
Southwest Airlines doesn’t publicly release its volume of wheelchair requests, but we know they had more than other airlines and American Airlines had 8 million requests in 2023. Reportedly wheelchair requests at Southwest have fallen 80% for San Juan flights, according to a manager at BWI airport. But if these customer service calls offering free premium seats to wheelchair request passengers continue, that trend may reverse.
Jetway Jesus is so back!
No need to go to Changi, I’ve seen the same chairs at Miami International.
Alaska Airlines uses those same robotic wheelchairs for passengers in the C and D concourses in Seattle. They are very slow and people constantly get in the way of them leading to abrupt stops.
@Ron — Whether MIA or SIN, same heat, humidity, and wheelchairs, huh!
@Gary, did you really have to tell the world how they can delay my Southwest flights and increase ticket prices?
I was shocked to hear Watterson say this and couldn’t help but think that WN still hasn’t figured out how to manage the complexities which WN has created and which other airlines have managed w/o giving away a higher level product than the passenger pays for.
He also said he would fight to not add more turn time even though Cranky noted that WN’s on-time this summer has fallen well below other carriers. Andrew says they are working on process improvements which they should do but when they are misconnecting lots of passengers because of low on-time, it seems that prioritizing on-time should be done UNTIL they figure out the process improvements which don’t involve giving away services that they expect other people to pay for.