Narrow Seats and Narrow Minds Make This Airline Nobody's Bargain!
Written: Jun 20 '02 (Updated Jun 20 '02)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Everyday low fares for people too lazy to comparison shop.
Cons: Much less seatroom, long layovers, poor Frequent Flier Plan, peanuts.
The Bottom Line: Southwest's one and only benefit has been price. Their 7% to 25% narrower seats are, on average, cheaper. Hotwire.com and Priceline.com have eliminated this benefit.
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| frazzledspice's Full Review: Southwest Airlines |
The recent brouhaha over Southwest Airline’s decision to make plus-size passengers purchase an additional seat has inspired me to rewrite one of my very first Epinions, first written on November 17, 1999.
I wasn’t that fond of Southwest Airlines then, and the articles I’ve read over the past few days have given me even more reasons to be disenchanted with them.
Q. Can plus-size passengers fit into Southwest Airlines’ seats as easily as they can into other coach seating?
A. They can’t. Southwest Air’s seat width, as reported in USA Today, is 17.25 inches. “Gee, that seems awfully small,” I thought. New York City Subway seats are 18 inches wide, and I have heard for years that they are “designed for Japanese fannies” and that they were the MTA’s most foolish purchase ever.
I put “airline seat width” in on a Lycos search, and found an interesting website:
http://www.grandstyle.com/roomycoa.htm
In a reprint of a Consumer Reports article, I saw the following stats, based on Delta, United, American, and US Air fleets.
DC 9’s and MD 80’s have seat widths of 20 to 23 inches. Southwest Air’s seats are 14 to 25% narrower than average seat widths on DC 9’s and MD 80’s.
757’s and 767’s have 19 inch wide seats--10% roomier than Southwest Air’s seats.
747’s have seat widths between 19.5 and 20.5 inches--12% to 16% roomier than Southwest Air’s seats.
L1011’s have seat widths between 18.5 and 20 inches--7% to 14% roomier than Southwest Air’s seats.
Since Southwest Airlines doesn’t have assigned seating, I have frequently been at the end of the line on connecting flights, sitting in the middle seat in the back of the plane, between people of all shapes and sizes. I have occasionally felt cramped or encroached upon, but it always seemed to me as if the seats were not quite as wide as other airlines’.
Even now they’re not publicizing the fact that their seat widths are 7% to 25% narrower than other airlines’ seats. Instead, they’re seeking to make a fast buck on their undersized seats by charging some passengers double airfares.
Q. Are the plus-size passengers getting double flight credits for a double seat purchase? Is Southwest Airline’s frequent flier plan any good, anyway?
A. According to June 20’s USA Today, plus-size passengers who are asked to purchase additional seats will not qualify for double flight credits, even though they would have to earn double flight credits to fly free. (To be fair to Southwest, they probably feel that heavy people who are singled out and humiliated once will never fly with them again, anyway.)
But I was never that thrilled with Southwest Air’s frequent flier plan, anyway. You had to earn enough credits for a free trip in a one-year period, virtually impossible for leisure travelers. Then, when you do earn the trip, they send you your voucher right away and you have to use it within a year. We only earned one free trip on Southwest Airlines as frequent fliers, due to these draconian restrictions. Then, when the voucher was ready to expire and we hadn’t used it, I gave it to a friend to come and visit me. The trip was only 300 miles--the kind of trip I’d usually drive. Southwest Airline’s frequent flier plan is absolutely worthless to my family.
Q. Do they really offer the best prices?
A. Whenever I fly, I always check Southwest Airline’s prices, and am still prepared to fly them when there are no other good fares to be found. I live in a small city now, and the nearest major airport is 115 miles away. Still, if there were a price difference of $100 a ticket, I might consider flying Southwest.
Since the advent of travel sites such as hotwire.com and priceline.com, I have always been able to find much more reasonable plane tickets that offer me the convenience of traveling from my small, one-gate airport 5 short miles from my home.
I just purchased three tickets for my family to fly to New York in mid-July. Through hotwire, I was able to find them for $219. each, making just one connection.
When I checked Southwest, they were in the mid $300’s, departing from the airport 115 miles away, arriving at Islip-MacArthur rather than LaGuardia, making several stops with long layovers.
We have even found better travel deals through priceline when we’ve had to fly at the last minute for family emergencies.
Q. Does Southwest have anything like “direct flights?”
A. Most of our trips on Southwest Airlines have taken 8 hours or so for us to travel 1,000 miles. We have had long, long layovers (3 hours and 55 minutes) at some of the most inhospitable airports in the country (Midway in Chicago.) When they tell passengers how many stops the plane will make, they don’t even count the stops where you don’t change planes (and we’ve had several of those as well.) With all the charges that airports and the federal government is putting on each takeoff and landing, the most disagreeable, inconvenient flights (the kind Southwest specializes in) have the most extra charges.
Q. What’s the customer service like?
A. The flight attendants and pilots make jokes as they pass out sodas and peanuts. For breakfast they serve Sara Lee toaster danishes and coffee. There are no in-flight movies or shows or other perks. Even if you have a good seat assignment on your first leg, if you get to your connecting gate late, you’ll have the worst 17 1/4 inch seat on the plane.
And I have never heard them make exceptions for disabled passengers or parents with young children.
They do give free drink coupons out when they send out frequent flier vouchers--a book of eight or so per voucher. I guess they prefer alcoholics to plus-size passengers.
When I wrote my first Epinion on Southwest Airlines in November, 1999, I called them “The Tramp Steamer of Airlines.” That was before hotwire and priceline took away their one small advantage--price.
I can’t imagine a reason why I would ever fly Southwest again.
Recommended:
No
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