Wanna get away (with something)?
Sometimes it feels better than getting what you paid for.
We can finally admit the secret reason why so many people used to love Southwest Airlines.
It’s that people like feeling like they’re getting away with something. Southwest Airlines used to offer lots of opportunities to get away with things. I’ll be dating myself with some of these, but …
There was a time when it never made sense to pay more than $300 for any Southwest round-trip flight, since that was the going rate on eBay for a Rapid Rewards round-trip flight voucher.
Or else, there was a brief and beautiful moment two decades ago, when Southwest was working hard to get passengers to check in for flights online, but many still weren’t comfortable with the idea. It made it easy to get a very early boarding priority.
Most recently, passengers realized that if they were traveling with friends or family, they only needed one member of their group to board early; he or she could block out and reserve some of the best seats for the rest of their group.
I’ll plead the Fifth on whether I actually ever did any of these things myself.
However, even as Southwest has recently done away with many of the quirks that made passengers love it, it turns out that there’s one last way to get away with something when you fly Southwest.
It has to do with how long it’s going to take Southwest to complete the arduous task of retrofitting its fleet of planes in order to create premium seating.
Seats upfront will get a bit more legroom, while the ones in the back will have a bit less legroom as a result.
Southwest started flying planes with these reconfigured cabins at the start of this month, according to a report, although they won’t be able to make the changes to all Southwest airplanes until sometime in 2026.
Meanwhile, Southwest can’t actually sell tickets for premium seats until it’s confident that every plane will have them since they also don’t know for sure ahead of time which of its roughly 800 Boeing 737 variant aircraft will be assigned to each of its routes.
All of this leads to an opportunity not just to get away with Southwest, as the airline likes to put it, but to get away with something.
For the rest of the year at least, as Gary Leff put it at View From the Wing, Southwest passengers will “become increasingly likely throughout 2025 to wind up with a plane that has premium seats, but where seats are still available free on a first-come, first-served basis.”
In other words, you can temporarily sit in an extra legroom premium seat — one that Southwest eventually plans to charge a premium price for — without having to pay it.
This assumes that you board the plane early enough to snag it, which probably means it’s mostly going to be Southwest’s most loyal passengers, who either have status or are willing to pay for early boarding priority, who will be the ones who benefit.
Of course, the flip side is that if you don’t have early boarding priority, you’re more likely to wind up in the back in one of the seats that will have to give up some legroom so that the passengers in the front can have more.
Overall, I guess this is what we’d call a transition cost, leavened with nostalgia. (Remember when we all used to be into nostalgia?)
On the way out, however, don’t feel bad about getting something for nothing, if you can pull it off.
If there’s a better way to remember the old Southwest, I haven’t thought of it.
7 other things worth knowing today
President Donald Trump kicked off the first major international trip of his second term Tuesday. The president’s sons, who head the Trump Organization, have spent the past few weeks crisscrossing the Middle East, laying the groundwork for deals that will benefit the company and, in some instances, Trump himself. Government watchdogs, presidential historians and other critics say it is an escalation of unethical and even unconstitutional conflicts between the interests of the United States and its president. (The Washington Post)
More bad news for Newark Liberty International Airport (where Southwest no longer flies, by the way). The Federal Aviation Administration wants to keep reducing flights at the troubled airport for months to come. That means fewer options for travelers as the federal government works to fix equipment and staffing issues. (CBS News)
The Episcopal Church will terminate its partnership to resettle refugees with the U.S. government over a request to resettle a group of white Afrikaners after the administration had effectively halted the U.S. refugee program. The move comes after President Donald Trump suspended the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program shortly after taking office in January, leaving tens of thousands of asylum seekers approved for resettlement in limbo. (Christian Post)
The Cannes Film Festival red carpet is perhaps the most rigidly controlled red carpet in the world. Now, the festival has added a new stipulation: no nudity. The policy tweak sparked widespread attention Monday because of the recent trend of sheer and “nude dresses, ” such as Bianca Censori’s Grammys appearance. (AP)
Joe Biden “totally [effed] us” by leaving it too late to drop out of the 2024 US presidential election, a former top campaign aide to Kamala Harris has told the authors of a new book. David Plouffe, who was manager of Barack Obama’s winning 2008 campaign and a senior adviser in his White House, was drafted in to help Harris’s bid for president after the declining Biden withdrew from the race last summer. Harris’s 107-day sprint against Donald Trump was “a ... nightmare”, Plouffe is quoted as saying by authors Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson in Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again. (The Guardian)
We have officially entered the Real ID era of air travel. So, what happens if you show up to the airport without the proper identification? According to the TSA, you will generally be able to board your plane, even without a Real ID. “As long as identity can be verified, I don’t foresee a time when we would actually deny someone entry into the sterile area,” a TSA spokesperson told Afar. “It might just take some additional time.” (Afar)
The universe is poised to die much faster than previously thought, according to new research by Dutch scientists. But there's no great need to panic. We still have 10 to the power of 78 years before it happens — that's a one with 78 zeroes. However, that is a major revision from the previous estimate of 10 to the power of 1,100 years, notes the research paper from Radboud University, published in the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics. (CBS News)
Thanks for reading. Photo by Forsaken Films on Unsplash. I wrote about some of this before at Inc.com. See you in the comments.
In honor of the “Wanna’ get away with something” headline and the first of 7 things, here is an excerpt from a NYT article by Eric Lipton:
“Now that President Trump is back in office, his family is profiting from his brand: At least $2 billion has flowed to Trump companies in just the last month. The ventures include real estate, a cryptocurrency and a private club slated to open in Washington with a $500,000 membership fee. Now, Qatar may give him a new presidential airplane.
The ethical mess is obvious. Trump is both the commander in chief and a business partner of foreign governments in Serbia, the United Arab Emirates and Oman. The White House says his sons run his companies, so there’s no conflict. Legally, that’s true.
But Trump is still getting rich (or richer) from all of it. And that leaves incentives for the president to pay back his business partners with policy decisions designed to help them, which is how the law defines corruption.”
Anyone curious why Qatar would just “gift” him a $400 million plane?
Loved the article in the Guardian. So appropos what Biden did (and as if Harris needed Biden to "destroy" her). Hopefully '28 will bring us better candidates than our last two (three) admins.