Southwest Airlines Community

I really hope you realize that the damage has been done here. Your "apology" hardly qualifies as an act of contrition. It is full of spin and "we COULD have handled this differently" "this May have been a bad decision" "We are Sorry, and we are reviewing our policy." is an Apology. "We regret that this incident took place, and we maybe could have done this differently, but wait we still stand by enforcing this 25 year old policy that ensures the comfort and safety of our customers" is NOT an apology. It's an attempt to dig out from under a mountain of bad PR because you make the mistake every airline makes: You don't pay your employees enough to care about the company image, you don't train your employees enough to make them able to handle simple things like "if the armrests go down, then this is not a "customer of size". Your point of contact with your customers are so underpaid and poorly prepared to work with humans on a daily basis that the vast majority dislike dealing with them. We just want to get through the terminal, get on our cramped seat, that we paid too much for and not die in a plane crash, and if we're lucky, IF we're lucky, we'll be able to fall asleep long enough for the discomfort to seem like minutes instead of hours. ... View more

Kind of awesome how you're trying to spin this like it's his fault and he should have known better. Especially when he demonstrated his ability to operate his arm rests which is the test that qualifies someone as a "customer of size." How about "we want to extort people who could potentially be too big to fit in a single seat, so we'll dance around the issue and claim that there's a safety issue and then demand that they purchase a second ticket." Interesting that the two most notable stories of this happening to people are on RETURN flights, when they're desperate to get back home... Especially since both people (Kevin and Natalie) had flown Multiple times in the past few months on Southwest without incident... Sounds like a way to coerce paying customers to pay more on flights to me. I totally agree that fat people taking up room in other seats isn't fair to other customers who are paying for their whole seat... but if you're going to make up a rule to prevent this how about trying to enforce it in situations where it makes sense. Also if you can't point to a solid reason why someone qualifies as a "customer of size" it sounds like you haven't thought this through. This type of mismanagement is why the airlines have been struggling for years. Put simply, airlines suck at making common sense decisions. Now it seams Southwest is the king of the idiots. ... View more