Originally Posted by
RoadWarrior200
A few days after my original posting, I saw some news articles about rumors that WN may announce a few months from now that they may move to assigned seating. This is one of many such articles:
https://www.nbcchicago.com/news/loca...tices/3422109/.
For lots of reasons, it makes sense. As I said in my original posting, the main advantage of WN for me in years past, especially for short-haul flights, was the ability to change reservations without a fee and to be able to use unused funds on future flights. But now that the legacy carriers all offer this, and with my status on the legacy airlines, I also get a preferred assigned seat and early boarding as well, and at no additional cost (unlike increasingly less useful EBIC). Plus even if I or others were to check our bags, which we usually don't, there are lots of ways to get free bags on other carriers as well. So I suspect and even hope the rumors might be true. I would be happy for WN to modify their business model in order to remain a great company that also remains highly profitable.
It's another round of an AP reporter dreams up something based on one line in a press release and now it's going to happen. WN would have to completely redo their entire reservation system to assign seats. They can't charge more for the front part of the plane because of Preboard regulations. And as it even says in the article, they aren't going to do anything that would slow down boarding. Having an incentive to to be ready when your boarding group is called does make WN markedly faster to board than the three legacies. They are always looking into ways to make boarding faster and things that will raise ancillary revenue. Raising labor costs by more than 20% in the past year means revenues need to go up to maintain profitability. Either ancillary revenues or fares. I see a large number of people already complaining because the fares are higher than in previous years.