Is this seat taken?
Southwest passengers tangle over the answer.
Stu Weinshanker was boarding a Southwest Airlines flight in Las Vegas when he found something occupying his wife’s seat.
Well, not technically her seat because Southwest famously doesn’t assign seats. It was the exit-row aisle seat she had her eyes on so they could sit across from one another. They had each paid the airline’s $15 early-bird fee in hopes of snagging the coveted seats with extra legroom — Weinshanker is 6-foot-2 — during Southwest’s firstcome, first-served boarding.
A passenger who boarded before the couple was saving the aisle seat for her boyfriend because he was near the end of the line. She sat in the middle and put a tablet on the aisle seat.
Weinshanker told her, nicely he says, that Southwest has open seating and asked her to move the tablet to the window seat to try to save that for her boyfriend. She did, but burst into tears when her boyfriend boarded, telling him Weinshanker had intimidated her.
“He had to buy her all kinds of alcohol to get her to calm down,’’ the San Diego sales rep and consultant said.
Southwest, the nation’s largest domestic carrier, gets plenty of love for its free bags, funny flight attendants and low fares. But it attracts plenty of disdain, too, for its one-of-a-kind boarding process. Passengers are assigned a boarding group and sit in any open seat when it’s their turn to board.
The open-seating system spawns seat-saving, in which people who board first save seats for spouses, kids, friends and co-workers farther back in line, leaving fewer choices for other passengers. It’s the airline version of saving seats at the movies or pool.
A passionate debate
The topic divides Southwest passengers into two passionate camps.
In one corner: those who see seatsaving as patently unfair and brand seat-savers as entitled passengers, seat cheats, seat hoarders, seat jerks and cheapskates (for not paying for early boarding for their group). The harshest comments are reserved for those who save seats in the front of the plane or exit rows or an entire row.
In the other camp: passengers who think seat-saving is a first-world problem akin to spotty in-flight Wi-Fi, and that people who are deeply bothered by it are spoiling for a fight, passive/ aggressive or have no empathy for families traveling with young children.
Officially, Southwest stays mum on the topic. The airline doesn’t have a policy allowing or forbidding seat saving, leaving passengers and flight attendants to solve disputes on an individual basis. Many say the airline implicitly allows seat saving by not hav- ing a policy.
“It’s something that at times has put our flight attendants in a difficult position,” said Audrey Stone, president of Southwest’s flight attendants union, adding that it rarely escalates into a security issue. “We’re counted on to just handle it as gracefully as possible if conflict occurs and our customers bring us into the discussion.”
Stone said flight attendants generally wish the airline would institute a policy on seat-saving. But Southwest says the issue is manageable and that creating a policy for or against saving seats would create more problems than it solves, taking flight attendants away from their main focus on safety procedures and hospitality during boarding.
“They have a lot going on,” said Steven Murtoff, senior director of onboard experience and policy, in-flight. “The issue of a policy is, you have a policy now you’ve got to enforce it.”
Social media hot-button
The seat-saving kerfuffle — which one passenger on Twitter called the adult incarnation of the middle school lunch room — isn’t going anywhere.
Complaints, questions and comments about Southwest seat-saving abound on social media and frequentflier sites. It’s a big topic on Twitter. It also is a perennially popular topic in the Southwest forums on frequent-flier site FlyerTalk, and even on the companyrun online forum The Southwest Airlines Community. In 2016, one thread had so many comments that the moderator shut it down and labeled the issue “resolved.” The topic popped up again a few weeks later and remains today.
Seat-saving issues intensified with the advent of early-boarding fees. Southwest introduced EarlyBird CheckIn in 2009 for $10 (it’s now $15) and a couple years ago added “upgraded boarding” at the gate. For $30 or $40 passengers can be among the first 15 passengers in line if those primo boarding slots aren’t occupied by passengers holding business select tickets.
Combined with preferred boarding for the airline’s frequent fliers, the system creates two classes of travelers on an airline whose CEO says there is no second class: those with priority boarding and those without. Those without priority boarding are being pushed farther back in the Southwest boarding line. Seeing a saved seat when they get on the flight only adds to their angst.
Who does it?
Another issue that has cropped up: Couples and families trying to save money or game the system pay the early boarding fee for one family member and save seats for the rest.
Southwest frequent flier Jonathan Bodow, a Tempe, Ariz., sales executive, says he sees seat saving on just about every flight. Bodow, who has Southwest’s highest frequent-flier status, concedes he does what he calls a “soft seat save” when traveling with his wife and teenagers. He pays the early checkin fee for at least two of them and puts a bag on one or two seats “hoping they’ll be on soon enough.”
Even though Southwest doesn’t have an official policy on seat saving, the airline’s Murtoff has a personal stance when he travels.
Asked whether he saves seats, he replied: “I would not.”