Why is Southwest leaving money on the table?

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boarding-pass-a.pngSouthwest Airlines recently changed its famous seating policy by which I’ve always been fascinated. If you’re not familiar with it, what happens is that you are not assigned a seat when you purchase a ticket. When you check in at the airport (or online up to 24 hours before the flight) you are assigned a group: A, B, or C. At boarding time the groups are called in order and passengers seat themselves wherever they like. The change now coming into effect is simply that in addition to a group assignment, passengers will now also get a position within the group (i.e. A15, B32, etc.). Still no assigned seating, though.

The change is an improvement. What would happen before is that about an hour or more prior to departure, a line would start to form in front of the gate. Even if you had a group “A” ticket, you had an incentive to be the first in the group. The incentive was even stronger for “B” and “C” passengers because the difference between the first in B and the last might be having to sit in a middle seat or not. The new assigned line position will mean that people will now likely start to queue up about five minutes before departure, sparing us a waste of time.

Now, I think I understand why Southwest wants a no-assigned-seat policy. It creates an incentive for passengers to line-up in an orderly manner and board quickly (in order to get a good seat). As my colleague Drew pointed out to me, that is an airline’s dream. What I don’t understand is why Southwest leaves money on the table by refusing to sell to passengers the order of boarding. There’s clearly a market for this as websites abound that will charge you a fee to automatically check you in at the first possible moment (and therefore get you in the “A” group). If you have an idea why, let me know.

Oct 11, 2007 | Comments | Tags: , ,

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