Assigned seating is a horrible idea, and I'd hate to see Southwest implement it. I fly Southwest whenever possible, though on occasion I end up on a different airline due to flight availability (i.e. for my Grandfather's funeral this past January).
Every time I've flown some other carrier, it has been amazing to watch how much less efficient the boarding process is than with Southwest, due to the disaster that is people looking for, and being forced to cross each other to get to, their assigned seats. In addition, customers are usually much more grouchy getting into their seats on other airlines -- they have no incentive to board quickly, and they're busy anticipating the loud/smelly/fat/otherwise aggravating person they'll be forced to sit next to. More often than not, I've run into families that are busy yelling at flight attendants over the fact that they're nota ble to sit together due to the way their assigned seating fell. Most of the time, assigned seating does nothing but make customers unhappy while losing the airline money.
People who are complaining about the need to arrive early at the airport even when they've bought tickets well in advance are just whiners. It's not hard at all to get in the "A" boarding group -- in all of the times I've flown Southwest since the introduction of online checkin, I've never once been in "B" or "C" -- and any seat you get in the "A" group is going to be a good one.
Even going with a small set of assigned seats presents serious problems. Part of the beauty of Southwest is that you can get a great seat through your own efforts, i.e. checking in and/or showing up early. If assigned seats were sold at a higher rate than regular seats, they'd almost certainly have to be the good seats (i.e. front few rows, exit rows, etc.), else no one would pay for them. The problem here, though, is that if you give all of the good seats to people who are paying extra, regular customers will lose the possibility of an excellent seat, and become very irritated in the process. You're likely to alienate a large portion of your customer base to please a very, very tiny portion thereof.
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