I've only flown Southwest once, and honestly would rather pay a higher price and go to an airport out of my way than to ever fly Southwest again. This airline, for some reason unfathomable to any intelligent person, combines the narrow, uncomfortable seating of air travel with the stressful, irritating 'grab a seat or lose it' style seating of a bus.
Please, start assigning seats like other airlines...you'll probably get more customers if you do, rather than chasing customers away.
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03-02-2008
07:58 PM
271 Loves
I have to say, if I'd known that Southwest was the one with the COS policy that's been so hotly debated, I would have saved myself the stress and gone with Delta or American, which I have flown with before and had no problems.
I haven't flown for a little over a year, and, as I am a 'customer of size' as Southwest so sensitively puts it, the ride was a bit cramped, not a big hardship, but I wanted to see the seat widths to figure how comfortable/uncomfortable I'd be...
After a few hours searching on the internet as well as the SWA site, I've decided not to fly Southwest again, regardless of how well this trip goes.
I find it interesting that not only did Southwest not offer any information about seat sizes, but they also offered no links to any sites with that information (I found on a separate site that an economy seat on a Boeing 747 has a 17 inch wide seat...), then I had to do an off-site search to find their 'COS' Q&A, because it was nearly impossible to find it through the site itself.
At one point, the Q&A states that SWA 'can no longer ignore the complaints' etc, etc, of people whose seats were 'encroached upon'...and yet, when asked why the information about pre-boarding, second seat, etc, isn't in any of their ticketing information, online or offline, the answer was that 'less than half of one percent' of passengers would be effected...
Does anyone else see the discrepancy?
To my mind, the 'COS' terms seem to give the airline way too much leeway in determining whether or not a person has to buy a second seat.
SWA claims to be implementing this for safety and comfort reasons...but I highly doubt it, it seems more about turning a higher profit, and targeting those who are unlikely to fight back...
and to the person who claimed that the armrests must be down for safety reasons, could you tell me exactly why? Because I'm sure I've never heard that said, ever, on any airline.
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