Originally Posted by nsx
Au contraire. You will be removed from the flight and your seat will be given away if you don't show up. It almost happened to me once. I showed up 3 minutes before departure just as they were about to give away my seat -- the last seat. The fact that I had a single-digit A made the difference, I think. They probably gave away others' seats first, working in reverse order of check-in (by boarding pass number).
As the above poster stated, this shouldn't be a problem on a
continuing flight. Just walk off the plane and directly to the back of the "A" boarding line and you should be fine.
Originally Posted by lewisc
My question is if the flight is delayed by 30 minutes, and they don't do an equipment change, will they re-assign your seat while you're still in the air, ie 10 minutes before the scheduled departure time. I think they normally wait until the plane is loaded but I'm not sure if they have to.
I don't think there would be anyway SWA would re-assign your seat. That would require an agent to go thru all of the boarding lines and manually check each person's boarding pass to make sure that EVERYBODY was actually there and ready to fly. I don't think that would happen. So you would pretty much have until the last "C" person boarded before SWA would give away your seat I think. Although now with online checkin there might an increase in the number of people who check-in online but don't show up for the flight. Since most (if not all ) of those online checkins would be in the "A" group, if there were two gate agents, one could figure out the missing "A"s and could probably start calling for the missing "A"s during "B" + "C" boarding and then start giving away their seats if there was no response by mid-"C" boarding. That would also decrease the resulting delay from clearing standbys, but it very well might piss off "A"s who are just in the bathroom or making a phone call.