Southwest Airlines Community

If it makes you feel any better, I have submitted six lost and found reports in my years of flying SWA. Only two items were ever found, and both times it was my Kindle (i’m not looking to shoot for lucky number three!).     ... View more

You’re seeking advice on traveling internationally without a valid passport? Pack extra underwear and maybe some snack bars on the off-chance they even let you get on a plane down there. You’re gonna get detained somewhere along the line and maybe not briefly. ... View more

I gotta be honest with you, even if pre-board had been half of that, and there wasn’t a separate family boarding, with a high B now you likely would’ve been in the Cs somewhere.    I am on these birds a few times a week, and I have learned that no desired seat is ever guaranteed. I’m A16 pretty much every single time and that’s still often the case.   Your best bet to get a seat (or any type of seat I should say) you desire is to pony for Business Select or even Early Bird. Failing that, there are a lot of other airlines with assigned seating.   (All that said, I’m apt to agree with you and all these threads—it does seem like preboard gets taken advantage of with some minor regularity. It doesn’t bother me personally though as I prefer the exit rows and they can’t sit there, so I usually have few problems grabbing one of those seats.) ... View more

To be fair to Mr. Coleman, I’d probably have made the same assumption—a point is a point is a point, and I’ve reached the caps, so what gives? (I don’t have an SWA credit card and have always earned all my Companion Passes up in the air.)   But that’s not the case of course, a point isn’t always a point: my points bump for being A-List doesn’t count towards qualifying my Companion Pass for instance (perhaps ironically in this case).   Frankly I kinda like it—A-List benefits like boarding should be reserved for the frequent customers of the airline, not a bank’s credit card. The Companion Pass is a terrific reward as-is. ... View more

I don’t know about him, but I’m going to, creature. ... View more

He was just bragging about his Benz and his bank account while complaining nonstop about being stranded by a meltdown at a budget airline. ... View more

Before all the reimbursements start, can I offer you a breath? ... View more

That’s wild. I feel like it would be specious of me to claim I’m a “person of size” but at the same time, if I was denied so by SWA staff I would feel like, “Hey, do YOU want to be in my body crammed in a middle seat next to another 6’0+ 200lb+ dude from Seattle to Dallas? No? You’re kidding me.” ... View more

I go to the region for work quite a bit, and I’ve really come to love going there. Just gorgeous along the Wasatch there. Since I go for work, I don’t have the normal “vacation” kinda recs (someone else can advise the skiing/hiking, etc, though I do often hike behind the state Capitol in the mornings, great views) but I really love local chain Vessel Kitchen (fresh, healthy, delicious—I love the steelhead trout and the naan tacos) and downtown restaurant Boltcutter (it’s vegan Mexican—I know I know—but I love it, and I’m definitely not vegan). They do sweets really well there—I love Suss Cookies and Crumbl is great plus the requisite/omnipresent Swig (tasty sodas and sugar cookies). If you get the chance drive down to Provo and the BYU Creamery for some of that tasty chocolate milk of theirs, make the gorgeous drive behind Mount Timp over to Park City via Heber, then get some bourbon at High West there. Really good restaurants up by Midway near there, too.   The worst part? Having to fly into the new SLC airport. Just an awful awful sprawl, especially from the Southwest gates. You end up walking literally more than a mile to get to the rental car center, it’s added a ton of time to my travels. ... View more

I fly a few times a week with good ol’ SWA and finally got a gold bag snack mix again today on SJC-DAL. I think they might still be using up those genetic white pretzel bags at certain hubs because I haven’t seen it anywhere else this week (long, short, midrange) despite their reappearance elsewhere. I was told weeks earlier it was a supply chain issue, like so many things right now.   I loved the peanuts of old (they went great with a Friday flight home cocktail, ahem) but I too have been enjoying the snack mix, which popped up around last Spring. Hope they keep them around a while. ... View more

Heh, well, I don’t know if I can see it necessarily, but I feel like I’m feeling it. Flights seem to get consistently bumpier every passing year. I’ll buy a carbon offset now and then as I’m pretty sure my constant flying sure ain’t helping. ... View more

Am I crazy, or has the coffee been awful since the return? I used to think the Community was pretty good (if not amazing or anything) for airline coffee, but it tastes rather bad now. I don’t know if they are using old stale grounds from early 2020, or if the water filtration systems got calcified up, or what. Is it possible that they are using some cheapo generic brand due to supply issues, a la the pretzels right now? It’s enough to make me dip into my per diem and/or suffer the lines at the airport. ... View more

I tried to do this before, or at least ran it by SWA, as I’m a big-ish guy (6’2, 220) and my wife/Companion always wants the window seat (I’m not winning that argument) but also wants me sat next to her (sheesh). It’s…uncomfortable, for sure.   Anyway, the rationale I was given was twofold: weight and fuel calculations, and it flies in the face of (or at least complicates) the open-seating policy, which is one of their tentpoles, like it or not.  I don’t know how true that is (I don’t know why they would care otherwise as the revenue is indeed the same), but that’s what I was told. ... View more

Listen to cyle here, flexing on a virus on an airline messageboard. I bet it’s quaking in its nucleocapsid!   And gsking, I hear your takes  completely; I just think 1) where we are at as a society it is far more helpful for companies to start mandating them to get us over the hump (my industry mostly has just due to all the lost days of work), and 2) Southwest can’t say that they can’t give us OJ or scotch or soda water or whatever because they want to lessen the contact and subsequent risk the FAs have to take, then not mandate a vaccine that has demonstrably proved to reduce that risk. It looks like a gutless cop-out. So we keep doing what we’ve all been doing for…??? ... View more

Sure, and the mandated masking is a massive part of that. It would be great if we got to a place where we all didn’t have to wear masks on the plane. (Or, you know, get a cranberry juice or a Ginger ale.) Vaccines are the way forward on that. Southwest is punting, and it looks pathetic given everything that us passengers have had to put up with while flying the last couple years. ... View more

I certainly have. I’m up there, fully masked, as mandated, in a sealed tube packed in with 140 other pax and SWA staff for a number of hours every single week. They aren’t even doing regular service still! We just got COFFEE like six weeks ago.   How long are we gonna do this for? Southwest should be taking the lead on it. The science is clear, the law is clear.  ... View more

I know what you’re saying here, but SWA recently changed a few upcoming autumn flights of mine due to…who knows. The times were anywhere from 30 minutes to a few hours’ difference, usually at the expense of my vacation time, but OK, whatever.   But then I noticed, weeks after the changes, that in some cases, the flights went from non-stop to having a connector, or a longer layover, or from having one connection to two (for instance, they now had me going DAL-DEN-MDW-PHL instead of DAL-MDW-PHL…lol, get out!). None of that was expressed in the initial changes email.   When there are options to get from A to B, that matters—layovers matter, time in the air matters, number of connections matter. ... View more

I’ve been flying Southwest 2-3x a week for several years now—I’ve been meaning to finally join this messageboard I’ve lurked for so long, so thanks, as it’s a good question.   When I first took a field job, I primarily chose Southwest because of the frequency of service to my two prime stops, Albuquerque and New Orleans (but I handle Portland OR to San Juan PR, and can/do use SWA to get to all those locales).   In the intervening years, the reasons have changed:   1. The Companion Pass, one of the better if not best reward of all the domestic airlines—my wife flies for free with me and we use the heck out of it with no restrictions. 2. The customer service. On the phone and at the gate and on the plane and on social media, I’ve always had good, usually very good, responsive experiences with staff. 3. Open seating. As I most often book less than a week before flying, I love that I’m not stuck picking the best of a bunch of middle seats.   Now, those are my main reasons, they might not work for others, just as others’ reasons reasons might not be best for me (like, I very very rarely check a bag, but I like knowing I can for free if I choose).   And I’m not saying they are perfect, not hardly. They had a pretty rough early summer, as poor COVID business decisions SWA made and outside tech issues and the severe weather created a perfect storm of problems that pax had to suffer through (and I did). I’ve done my share of complaining to Southwest staff for sure.   But for the vast majority of the time, before and since, they get me there on time (or early) and most importantly, safely (their top track record on that is important to me, too). I’m a happy customer, which is more than I can say for, say, my rental car companies.   Now, if you don’t like them, fine, whatever, but no one here can do anything about it (or even care, to be frank)—it’s a messageboard for pax to share info and opinions amongst themselves.   Good luck/Godspeed. ... View more