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Southwest Airlines now available on Google Flights

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Re: Southwest Airlines now available on Google Flights

#101

Post by hi-v-rocknroll »

tl;dr: Trains and boats are less terrible.

Not SW-specific, but air travel generally:

- Climate change: carbon footprint nearly 44% greater than a single occupancy vehicle but multiplied over thousands of miles

- Monetized misery with short seat pitches, junk fees, and preferential treatment with $$$

- Inconsistent, sometimes terrible customer service (About 10 years ago, I was stuck at Heathrow but Virgin Atlantic once showed me how to and let me use their booking terminal directly to find a flight on any carrier. They definitely had customer service.)

- Regular inconveniences like endless gate changes (AA pulled this 11x in 6 hours to me at DFW)

- Sketchy maintenance practices like offshoring MRO

- Close calls and ATC shortage

Re: Southwest Airlines now available on Google Flights

#102

Post by AlotOfReading »

Lendal wrote: post #92
vasco wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> unassigned seating zoo I never flew SW, can you or someone explain what the problem is with unassigned seats (what makes it a zoo)? I've used long distance trains and buses and it has been fine.

They don't charge extra for assigned seats. Instead, you pick your seat by sitting in it. Which means you need to board earlier. Boarding order is assigned by the order in which you check in. To do that, you get the Southwest app and check in the moment the notification pops up on your phone. If you do that, you board ahead of everyone else. Free of charge. If you believe paying paying extra fees for every little thi…

You're already behind if you're hitting the check-in button because of how connecting flights work. Passengers can check in 24h ahead of the earliest flight on their ticket, which is >24h ahead of the flight you're on. It's usually not a problem being A20 vs A15, but it can be much worse if you're joining the last leg of a popular connection.

Re: Southwest Airlines now available on Google Flights

#103

Post by nojvek »

eiiot wrote: post #46

> Southwest even sues websites that display its schedules and fares without authorization Why does Southwest even have any jurisdiction here? It seems like they won a preliminary case, but don't we have established president that scraping websites is legal, thanks to hiQ Labs v. LinkedIn?

Would love to read more about it, anyone got link to the court case?

Really thinking of doing a startup in scraping websites and turning it into filterable/sortable tables that can be queried via sql.

Re: Southwest Airlines now available on Google Flights

#104

Post by fckgw »

lvspiff wrote: post #44
CSSer wrote: post #27

This is going to sound like an ad, but I exclusively fly SW domestically. As noted, they used to look like a worse value but only because of the way competition handled fees. Couple this with the standard rewards program and I think SW is a steal. Did you know that SW is also the only domestic airline to have never filed bankruptcy? I’m glad to see the rest of the world being forced to compete more honestly. I’m sad…

I have a SW story that has made me dedicate my business to them moving forward: I had a trip to Austin where i was mid-flight when they cancelled all flights there a year or so ago. I was headed to Sacramento as a connection from PDX and when I landed I went to gate agent to let them know and they were already befuddled by other customers as everything east of colorado at that point was a mess, somehow though they fo…

Southwest does still have amazing customer service.

Re: Southwest Airlines now available on Google Flights

#105

Post by lxgr »

Lendal wrote: post #92
vasco wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> unassigned seating zoo I never flew SW, can you or someone explain what the problem is with unassigned seats (what makes it a zoo)? I've used long distance trains and buses and it has been fine.

They don't charge extra for assigned seats. Instead, you pick your seat by sitting in it. Which means you need to board earlier. Boarding order is assigned by the order in which you check in. To do that, you get the Southwest app and check in the moment the notification pops up on your phone. If you do that, you board ahead of everyone else. Free of charge. If you believe paying paying extra fees for every little thi…

Ah yes, fighting for seats by paying extra and having to board early, i.e. spending more time than strictly required in an airplane seat.

As somebody preferring to make use of that extra time in the airport, that sounds horrible.

Re: Southwest Airlines now available on Google Flights

#106

Post by lxgr »

mint2 wrote: post #93
parl_match wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just can't put up with the unassigned seating zoo, lack of premium class options, and other niceties.

Interesting, I find it refreshingly egalitarian and not classist and extractive. It really bothers me how other airlines treat seating as a way to further bleed customers of money and create tiers.

Nothing forces them to charge extra for seat assignments!

There are still a couple that include free seat assignments (within your booking class, and without introducing a fake "basic economy" class without assigned seats), and that's by far my preferred seating model.

Re: Southwest Airlines now available on Google Flights

#107

Post by lxgr »

cbhl wrote: post #38
fragmede wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the signal being derived never having declared bankruptcy? Doesn't that mean, comparatively, they're extracting more money from customers than the rest of the industry and spending less on things like maintenance? Both of those sound like bad things to me.

If you buy a plane ticket for the future, in a bankruptcy, you become an unsecured creditor of the airline. That means the airline could have taken your money, spent it, and the bankruptcy court can say that they don't actually have to honor your ticket because it falls below the line of the things the airline has money to actually pay people back for. And then you have to go buy another ticket on another airline. Be…

> If you buy a plane ticket for the future, in a bankruptcy, you become an unsecured creditor of the airline.

Unless you pay for it with a credit or debit card, which probably accounts for pretty much every ticket sold in the US.

In other words, this is simply not true. The airline's acquiring bank bears the bulk of the risk for almost all flights (except for those purchased extremely far out, i.e. much more than a year, and some other edge cases).

Re: Southwest Airlines now available on Google Flights

#108

Post by hnburnsy »

bombcar wrote: post #100
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> on SW you get unlimited companion flights for the term of the pass Oh wow, that is a great perk [1]. [1] https://www.southwest.com/rapid-rewards/tiers/companion-pass...

100 one way flights is a round trip a week, but I guess some hit it.

Credit card sign up and spend count towards earning the pass, one trick make a large tax payment with your cards to boost the points earned. Worth the fees you will pay.

Re: Southwest Airlines now available on Google Flights

#109

Post by ryandrake »

Lendal wrote: post #92
vasco wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> unassigned seating zoo I never flew SW, can you or someone explain what the problem is with unassigned seats (what makes it a zoo)? I've used long distance trains and buses and it has been fine.

They don't charge extra for assigned seats. Instead, you pick your seat by sitting in it. Which means you need to board earlier. Boarding order is assigned by the order in which you check in. To do that, you get the Southwest app and check in the moment the notification pops up on your phone. If you do that, you board ahead of everyone else. Free of charge. If you believe paying paying extra fees for every little thi…

How do they enforce that people who checked in earlier get to board earlier? Almost every other airline has "groups" where in theory, Group 1 boards while everyone else waits, then Group 1&2 are invited, and so on. But in reality, everyone just dogpiles the gate when Group 1 starts, regardless of their group, and nobody actually checks the group number or enforces anything.

Re: Southwest Airlines now available on Google Flights

#110

Post by secabeen »

ryandrake wrote: post #109
Lendal wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They don't charge extra for assigned seats. Instead, you pick your seat by sitting in it. Which means you need to board earlier. Boarding order is assigned by the order in which you check in. To do that, you get the Southwest app and check in the moment the notification pops up on your phone. If you do that, you board ahead of everyone else. Free of charge. If you believe paying paying extra fees for every little thi…

How do they enforce that people who checked in earlier get to board earlier? Almost every other airline has "groups" where in theory, Group 1 boards while everyone else waits, then Group 1&2 are invited, and so on. But in reality, everyone just dogpiles the gate when Group 1 starts, regardless of their group, and nobody actually checks the group number or enforces anything.

They create a single-file queue, with what is supposed to be a strict linear sorting. Instead of a group, you get a boarding number from A1 through C60. There's some flexibility in this, generally most people don't mind #44 going before #40, but you won't be able to line up or board after person #11 if your boarding card says #56. The gate agent will make you go to your correct place in line. Since it's a single-aisle plane, they run everyone through a single ticket reader, and thus have a point of enforcement.
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