I was disappointed that he held onto the assumption that everybody needs an assigned seat. Southwest has boarding groups, but not assigned seats. This feels vastly superior because once a person finds a seat they want to stay in it, as opposed to disrupting the incoming stream by trying to trade seats to be closer to traveling companions etc.
I'm actually amazed to hear someone say this. Maybe you only travel alone, like middle seats, and are always first to board?
Every time I accidentally fly Southwest, I'm horrified at how bad the boarding system is. People plop down wherever leaving one-seat holes so you can't sit with your partner.
It also guarantees more seat trading than an assigned system because most people in the assigned system have seats they wanted. People on Southwest flights are always haggling so they can sit with their partner. I almost never see seat trading on other flights.
My mind is blown. But then again every time I take a Southwest flight, I'm wondering "who tf is this for?" and I've finally found my guy.
Online check in 24 hours ahead of departure got me a good boarding number, so most aisle (and window) seats would be open. And the times I was flying with someone, one of us would take the middle seat.
The times I didn't check in early could suck, but I was pretty good at spotting couples that had split aisle-window (leaving the middle seat empty), and then calling their bluff.
But it's been several years since I've flown, and I'm sure all carriers have since innovated new ways of making the experience worse, while charging for the privilege of mitigating it.
This inevitably results in window and aisle seats being filled quickly, and nothing remaining (within that section) but middle seats.
And because corralling children (even teenage children!) is much harder than just getting up and walking on yourself, this results in families almost invariably having to either accept being spread across separate seats in multiple rows, or being pushy about trading seats with exactly the kinds of people who have aggressively made sure they get there first.
As a formerly very frequent traveler, not having an assigned seat sounds completely awful to me. Not that I've had much reason to use Southwest since I lived in the South, it's unlikely I would ever fly them barring unusual circumstances for that reason.
You're right about that, because if you go too far back and find out there are no seats that you want, you will have an awfully hard time moving towards the front. So when you see a seat that you find acceptable, you want to lock it in.
Still it would have been nice to see a comparison of the times between non-assigned front-to-back boarding and traditional assigned boarding. But I can imagine that's not so amenable to simulation.
