Originally Posted by
Chamor
I found this, from a CNN article about these changes, interesting:
"According to Southwest 80% of its customers and 86% of passengers who choose other airlines want assigned seats"
I am personally with the majority -- I don't like the line-up-game, and it is one of the reasons why I don't fly WN often. But I have the sense that many on FT like it. (I suppose those on this board -- in lots of ways -- are not necessarily representative of the universe of flyers)..
Their statistic is a little (perhaps deliberately) vague.
Do I want an assigned aisle seat in row 3? Of course!
Do I want an assigned middle seat in row 25? What do you think?
Ultimately this statistic comes down to a flawed perception by people that assigned seats would always necessarily result in a subjectively "better" seat than the one they find on their own.
In reality, the end result is that same number of passengers are still sitting in the same arrangement of seats.
The only difference is now Southwest will be collecting hundreds and hundreds of dollars of extra revenue from those passengers, many of whom are sitting in the exact same seat that would have been in anyway.