Gary,
PLEASE keep open seating. I travel over 100,000 miles a year on both SWA and AA here in Dallas. One of the worst things on AA is the "trainwreck" they call a boarding process (to be fair, it's the same on all the other non-SWA airlines). Watching the process once I get seated is a nightmare! Maude wants her bag in the overhead near her seat but Doug, who's eight rows back, put his bag there. Now Maude stands around looking for a place to stash her bag, holding up traffic until she has to head upstream and give it to the folks on the ramp to take below. Flight attendants are uncomfortable telling people to sit the heck down because - well - they need to be in "their" seat rather than the empty chair they're standing right next to. Finally, open seating introduces yet another common phenomenon: the guy who knows he has seat 6B so he waited until the plane was about to take off before running to the airport. With open seating, it's "so long, sucker" to that guy. I could go on...suffice it to say that I have now adopted a policy of closing my eyes until the cabin door is shut and everyone's seated on AA because I simply cannot stand to watch the boarding process anymore. During the same time on SWA, I'm usually striking up a great conversation with the person next to me, making the whole SWA experience more friendly, engaging, and enjoyable.
BTW - folks may not like the "mayhem" at the SWA gate area but, in my view, it's a "pay-me-now or pay-me-later" kind of thing. I'd rather take some jostling and confusion in the relatively large air-conditioned boarding area than have the continuous struggle in the cramped, one-aisle airplane where your excellent flight attendants will now find themselves hamstrung to do much to accelerate the process because - hey, it's the customer's assigned seat.
Good luck as you make the choice. Please know that the more you become like "them", the less compelling your value proposition becomes for "us".
Joe
P.S. I'm not an airline operations expert but I really have a hard time believing even Southwest can load an "assigned seat" aircraft as fast as it does a "open seating" plane today. I hope someone in Operations is traveling on other airlines to see what a disaster it is (and it only seems to get worse with higher load factors).
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