Southwest Airlines is Tinkering With its New Boarding Process Again As it Attempts to Solve Bin Space Dramas

Southwest Airlines is preparing to make further changes to its boarding process on Wednesday in an attempt to solve ongoing dramas with overhead bin space at the front of the plane filling up too quickly, leaving passengers frustrated and angry, and resulting in a lot of congestion in the jetbridge.

Here’s what the changes mean for your next flight:

On January 27, Southwest Airlines made one of the biggest changes in the Dallas-based company’s 58-year history: it abandoned its iconic open seating policy for assigned seating, and with it, introduced a new boarding process that was meant to make getting everyone on board as quick and painless as possible.

Despite having months to prepare for the change, it’s fair to say that Southwest has been dealing with a fair number of teething issues, and passengers are growing increasingly irritated with the situation.

Southwest is dealing with a flood of complaints from once loyal customers about the new boarding process and the lack of space in the overhead bins for their hand luggage, and the airline is all too keen to sort out the situation as quickly as possible.

The airline has introduced a group boarding strategy, which works like this:

Priority and pre-board	Customers with disabilities Active duty US military Customers who have purchased Priority Boarding
Groups 1 & 2	A-List Preferred Choice Extra fares Extra legroom seats
Groups 3 – 5	A-List Choice Preferred
Group 5	Rapid Rewards credit card holders
Groups 6 – 8	Choice fare Basic fare

As you can see, Southwest deliberately built some flexibility into the exact boarding groups in which some passengers will actually board the plane. For example, A-List Preferred members could be asked to board in Group 1 or in Group 2.

And A-List members could either board as early as Group 3 or as late as Group 5.

In an attempt to alleviate some issues with overhead bin space filling up early on in the boarding process, Southwest decided to move all extra legroom seat passengers into Group 1, but that hasn’t had the desired effect the airline was hoping for.

In fact, it’s had the opposite effect, and now, Southwest is making yet another change.

From February 18, only passengers sitting in the first three rows and self-help emergency exit rows will be included in Group 1, while Group 2 will now consist of A-List Preferred passengers, Choice Extra fare passengers, and all the other extra legroom seat passengers.

In an internal memo, the airline explained: “This is being done to help solve congestion in the jet bridge and bin space issues we saw this past week.”

What some passengers are finding so frustrating is that they simply don’t know which boarding group they are going to be in on the day, and now customers who had booked extra legroom seats outside of rows 1-3 are now scrabbling to reassign their seats so they are amongst the first on board.

Of course, this race to get on the plane first isn’t just about escaping the gate as quickly as possible but rather about securing limited space in the overhead bins for hand luggage.

What Southwest may have learned from all the other airlines that it has copied is that this is a similar tale the world over when passengers are encouraged through the effect of checked luggage fees to bring all their belongings on the plane.

Late last week, it also emerged that Southwest was making other on-board changes to alleviate hand baggage woes, by moving a reserved bin for flight attendants’ luggage from the front of the plane to the back.

That decision did not land well with the TWU 556 flight attendant union, which blamed the avalanche of complaints that Southwest is facing on its own “poor planning.”