It's been a year since you came to my home town, and I still love SWA!
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For the point to point traveler, open seating works for me.
From reading this blog, it seems like there is a need for BOTH open and preassigned seating ... Maybe it doesn't work so well if you have to cobble together multiple segments?
It seems like the industry's preassigned seating protocol has lots of flaws, so why be a 'me-too', when you have a chance to reinvent it?
I don't have the answer, but here's something to think about ...
As an experiment attach some caveats; set aside the rear of the craft for booking seats, and rather than hold a preassigned seat for the duration of boarding, pre-board the preassigned seaters, and after that release the seats to open seaters. You could see how many of the preassigned seaters resist the urge to cheat and actually take the seat they were assigned ... now that could tell a story, eh?
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I have waited forever for you to come to my hometown, and now that you are here, I am a convert. Open seating works for me _and_ my family. We don't always get to sit together, but sometimes that's better 😉 ... I do think that these cattle chutes could be changed to rows of chairs, and that may make it more comfortable for those, including myself, whose bones can't take all the stress of standing for an hour or sitting on the floor ... hey, just came up with another idea to float by y'all. Since seating seems to be a big factor in time-on-the-ground, why not take advantage of passenger-time-on-the-ground to improve airplane-time-on-the-ground? What if you arranged the seats at the gate to the same configuration as they are on the plane, using the time we normally wait in line to optimize/haggle the seating arrangements, so that when the flight gets to the gate, we're ready to go? Of course, this could all fall apart if cheaters come to play, so you'd have to have a way of dealing with that i guess .. oh well, it was just a thought ...
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