My last dash for open seats on Southwest

Every other major airline assigns seats. Now Southwest is laying its open-seating policy to rest.

LOS ANGELES—Kiran Gollapudi got lucky before his flight to Las Vegas took off on Saturday. The urologist nabbed a roomy exit-row seat on Southwest Airlines despite a mediocre boarding position, thanks to the airline’s one-of-a-kind open-seating policy.

“You can sit anywhere you want, just like at church” was one of the early slogans.

Not anymore. Southwest is laying open seating to rest after more than 50 years as it looks to boost revenue. Beginning Tuesday, all seats will be assigned.

Those quirky boarding positions will be replaced by boarding groups. Primo seats like those in the exit row and new extra-legroom seats in the front of the plane will cost extra. Unless, that is, you have frequent-flier status or certain Southwest credit cards or buy the airline’s priciest tickets.

Southwest passengers boarding a flight from San Diego to Sacramento, Calif.

Every major airline does it this way, of course, but it’s a seismic shift for a business that long touted its egalitarian ways. So I boarded a bunch of packed Southwest flights over the weekend to gauge the collective mood as this new era dawned.

Open seating has long divided travelers. Who can forget the seat-saving debate, preboarding abuses and Taylor Swift mention during an NYU commencement speech. (She and her mom used to pretend to fight so no one would sit in the middle seat next to them.) The waning days were no exception.

Gollapudi says he’ll miss the whimsy of it all, if not the stress of having to check in precisely 24 hours before your flight for the best boarding position. He was a few minutes late and ended up with B20. The prime positions are A1-A60.

“There’s a little bit of freedom to it,” he says. “A feeling like, ‘Hey I have a choice. I can sit wherever I want. Someone’s not telling me what to do.’ ”

He has no plans to pay extra for a seat like 16E, where he sat on the short flight to Vegas.

Marcy Montellano

Marcy Montellano, a frequent flier who lives in Las Vegas and works in sales, already has paid up for a better aisle seat. There were only seats in the back of the plane for her flight home from a business trip this week, so she paid $70 for an aisle seat with extra legroom near the front.

“At some point, you might as well enjoy yourself while traveling,” she says.

Montellano has been flying Southwest for nearly two decades. She fondly recalls the few times she nabbed an A1 boarding pass and felt like she had won the lottery. And the time an up-and-coming rapper plunked down in the open middle seat on his way to the Grammys.

Kymberley Sexton, a human-resources executive from San Diego, is sad to see the end of open seating. She, too, only ended up in a coveted exit-row seat on a flight to Sacramento on Sunday because of it.

Kymberley Sexton

Her boarding position was B44 and it happened to still be open. Sexton’s not generally fussy about her seat and says she will take whatever she’s assigned on future Southwest flights, including the dreaded middle.

Sexton says she was disappointed when Southwest announced the switch in July 2024. (You can’t say the airline didn’t give us enough notice!)

“It felt like the end of an era,” she says. “But also discouraging that business got to that point.”

Southwest seriously studied a switch to assigned seating in 2006. But executives said then that travelers overwhelmingly favored open seating and that it was the most efficient way to board a plane. The airline ended up tweaking its free-for-all boarding, introducing boarding positions and poles at every gate to signify where travelers should line up to board. (Those poles will start coming down.)

Fast forward to today, and CEO Bob Jordan insists 80% of passengers favor assigned seats. (Recall the airline is under investor pressure to boost profit. It started charging for bags, ditching its hallmark “bags fly free” policy, in May.)

Count Robert Bachiller among the travelers looking forward to it. The Sacramento, Calif., resident travels around the country for taekwondo tournaments, with his family returning from one in San Diego on Sunday.

He lucked out with one of Southwest’s famous extra-extra-extra legroom seats on Sunday, bolting across the aisle from my row when he spied it still open. I nabbed one, too, on that flight. (These seats, called everything from a treasured throne to daddy long legs, are sadly going away on many Southwest planes. The airline is adding a window seat in the row in front of it.)

The seat fee for the same seat (16F) on a flight from San Diego to Sacramento this Sunday: $44 one way.

Bachiller’s Southwest credit card takes away some seat-fee pain. But he says the best part about assigned seating is picking where you sit in advance, instead of playing Southwest-seat roulette on board.

One group solidly in favor of assigned seating: Southwest flight attendants.

“Two more days, not that we’re counting,” one attendant said as I boarded in Los Angeles.

Attendants have had to make repeated announcements about the airline’s open-seating policy to the uninitiated (newbies often think the boarding position on their boarding pass is a seat assignment), referee seat disputes and scramble to find seats for late-arriving connecting passengers and those in the last boarding group.

The airline calls these passengers spinners because they walk up and down the aisle in search of an open seat. That gums up efforts to get planes out on time. Southwest Chief Operating Officer Andrew Watterson promises that assigned seating will improve the airline’s already admirable reliability.

Watterson concedes he’s heard from more than a few travelers who aren’t happy with the switch. Perhaps the loudest: lobbyists and salespeople who have used open seating to zero in on a prospective client or lawmaker and plop down next to them for an in-flight pitch.I’ll miss the randomness of it all and the end of Southwest as we know it. But I am pretty thrilled to already know where I’m sitting on my Southwest flight home on Tuesday.