Southwest Airlines Community

The WiFi is free for me. As a 15+ year A-list Preferred I get free wife every year.  I get paid $300 an hour to be working. I'm on Southwest Airline flights anywhere from 8 to 20 hours a week for 48 to 50 weeks of the year. Even if I'm generous and say SWA wifi is reliable 50% of that time, I am losing min 200 hours of billable time a year, or $60,000 in income.   ... View more

Ha! How are you a " Top Contributor" for SWA and you have no clue as to what the Wright Amendant is and what it did? One of the major parts of Wright Amendmant giving SWA permission to base in Dallas was designed at the time to protect larger Dallas based American Airlines by preventing Southwest Airlines from flying into certain markets that were considered competing markets were American Airlines had a majority foothold. This wasn't just one city, it was hundreds across the US. Soon after October 2014 many of us frequent business travelers noticed an immediate impact in the number of available flights to common SWA hubs as Southwest cut many flight routes in order to re-route planes into new flight route markets they had never been allowed to fly into before.  This was about the time I also noticed Southwest customer service and attitude towards frequent business travelers went to crap. ... View more

15+ year Alist with Companion, 200k avg miler on SWA every year.  You'll notice many of these post UserNames are the same ones posting year after year and we are ALL saying the same thing year after year. Southwest WIFI is the worst in the industry and it gets worst every year and No they don't give a sh!t Yes they also selectivly block most work VPNs by targeting common VPN port usage (try moving from80 or 4433 to 443) or nesting your vpn through a commercial home user type VPN. If you are a frequent business traveler and you absolutley need to work while you fly.. find another airlines. IF the wifi even works you'll be lucky if you get AOL dial up speeds.  I sat next to a pilot for swa one time who told me off the record that ever since the Wright Amendmant expired in October 2014 and gave SWA oppertunity to reach more occasional vacation traveling families in new markets, they don't give a crap about A-list Preffered frequent business travelers. For every one of us that gets fed up and leaves, they will quickly fill that void with traveling families that need a discount ticket t fly two or three times a year.  Myself, I am tired of losing thousands of dollars in billable work because southwest is trying to be the Dollar Store of the airlines industry and won't spend money to fix simple things like Wifi networks.  ... View more

it is now 2021. The Wifi has not gotten any better. If anything it has gotten worse. I was really surprised to hear that the free TV users are diverted somehow, as I have noticed that the WiFi works pretty great until I see a bunch of people watching their free movies. Then the bandwidth on the WiFi goes to crap. I fly SWA on average about 250K miles a year and losing hours of productive work because of crappy Wifi is no longer acceptable. It really shows that SWA doesnt really care about their business fying customers and is more concerned with getting in-frequent flyers as new customers then keeping 10+ years Alist Preferred business customers on their planes.   The wifi is so crappy now, the screen shot below shows where I couldn't even register for the Southwest Community because the connection was so slow it wouldn't load the  image. When your own websites won't respond, that should be embarrassing.  ... View more

The reply above is incorrect. VPN absolutely used to be allowed with no issues. I've been Alist Pref FLying SWA 225K miles a year for 11 years now and I have a long history with their internet.   Prior to 2017-ish, the Wifi and VPN functionality worked very well.  After 2017 sometime, it stopped working as well and now their whole Wifi is pretty much crap.  ... View more