flyerCO

Why us this in the DL forum? Has zero to do with DL.

sydneyracquelle

Ysitincoach

flyerCO

Read it all. This was a thread about WN. Mods apparently agree also. If I want to know how WN service stacks up, I'll go to the WN forum.

rickg523

I thought this was the Southwest forum.

Lomapaseo

Tis easy to skip flying WN

I can book a confirmed good seat on DL. regardless of the boarding gate lice
I can fly extra leg room on DL but not on WN
I don't get gamed by people with altered boarding passes boarding in the A10 slots ahead of me having paid an exorbitant Early Boarding fee
I can use a nearby DL Sky lounge before my flight

Kevin AA

It is. Someone started the thread in the wrong forum and it got moved here.

Kevin AA

+1

flyer4512

I fly WN with my wife as we have Companion pass. We pay for EBCI and get mid A boarding.

I fly DL or AA when I'm alone..............I'll take the assigned seat any day. I book 99% of my flights the day they go on sale and always pay in miles and get a very good assigned seat with no status as all my miles are earned via CC sign up bonuses.

Since I have the DL/AA credit card I also board Zone 1/preferred so no problem storing my carry on and I get a free checked bag.

swingaling

I used to fly WN often, but I stopped several years ago for a few reasons. I always found B6 to be a much better experience overall.

• I hate the boarding process and the seating uncertainty, so I used to buy Early Bird.
• EB used to (ca. 2010) all but guarantee A1-15; that's no longer the case. Not even remotely.
• IROPS handling is a joke. Not as bad as F9, but not far off.

Finally, the main reason I used to fly WN was schedule convenience due to their lesser reliance on hubs. If I have to connect regardless, I don't really see the point of WN. Especially since they're no less expensive than the US3.

The majority of non-hub flights from my home airport are leisure routes (4x daily to MCO, 2x to FLL, 1x to TPA), and the mix of people on board is, well, interesting. A lot of unnecessary drama and poor behavior from folks who aren't accustomed to flying. I understand this is highly route dependent and not the fault of WN by any means.

EverGreen7230

That hasn't been my experience flying out of ATL, though to be fair I'm not nearly as frequent a flyer as most here. Flying out of ATL to DEN, CLE, and occasional other locations 2-3 times a year on Southwest, I've consistently gotten high A/low B boarding number checking in at 24 hours before. The only time I've ever had high B was when I forgot and checked in an hour late. To date, the worst delay I've had with Southwest was a little over 1.5 hours leaving HOU on the second to last flight of the night, due to the incoming flight being delayed somewhere else up the pipeline.

My most recent experience with AA on the other hand had my outbound from ATL-ORD cancelled due to "weather" 10 hours before departure when everybody else was still planning to operate as scheduled, second flight out of ATL to ORD. So instead of getting rested for my award trip to Japan, I ended up having to stay up another hour trying to protect my JAL F redemption. Reps were more than happy to route me to any other city and fly me over on AA metal, but no way could they put me on either of the next two flights or the very first flight out to ORD so that I could still make my original itinerary, and the option of putting me on Delta or United was never even brought up. I'm pretty much convinced at this point that as a low status peon, Southwest is no worse than the majors when it comes to re-accommodating passengers, so I'll continue flying them because they make flying much more pleasant than the majors.

darthbimmer

The common wisdom about WN is that it's better for no-status passengers than the big legacy airlines (AA, DL, UA) while the legacies are better for those who can achieve mid- or high tier status. Thus it's interesting that OP is offering a favorable comparison of flying no-status on WN to being a DL elite.

I'll gently point out that OP's good experience on WN occurred on a flight during which everything went right. Checking in at T-24 to get a low boarding number works when it works. But when you can't pull out your phone or computer right at T-24 to do it you might get stuck with a crummy number. And even having a great number doesn't help if you arrive late to boarding for whatever reason-- a frustrating one being that you're connecting and your inbound flight was late. And IRROPS... yeah, I've been stuck overnight twice in the past 12 months when the first leg of a connecting itinerary was delayed and WN didn't have anything else within its own network to get me there same-day. The last time that almost happened on a legacy (UA) they booked me over to another airline (AA) and I arrived only 2 hours later than planned that evening instead of the middle of the next day.

garykung

The WN way works because it is WN. It does not mean the WN way works for other airlines.

worldwidedreamer

I'm a graduating UA Gold, a WN A-lister and will soon be AS MVP. Overall the WN CP benefits outweigh UA E+ and the very rare upgrade. In my experience more WN Y passengers are business travelers, and more UA Y passengers are on their one flight per year.

As an aside, with WN it really pays to have the right credit card strategy. I have an Amex Platinum which gives me lounges on both sides of my winter commute OAK-RNO flights, along with my occasional LAS, PDX, MSP, LAX and SEA trips. Most of my WN travel is on "shuttle" routes with plenty of capacity to manage irrops. When I'm on a WN "long skinny" city pair I purchase the tickets with a Chase card that provides generous trip delay insurance; this does yield fewer points, but saves money in the long run. I use AS for my HNL laps (4x/year) and ANC laps (4x/year) and as a convenient account when I've gone non *A overseas. Given changes in Star Alliance, and improvements in AS, I've been sending more of my international business their way.

Peoriaman1

He said he got a high A. That doesn't mean A-1 or A-15, it means like A-40 or A-50 or so.