Southwest’s open-seating policy will be sorely missed.
Everyone knows that air travel isn’t what it used to be. Domestic flights are crowded and unglamorous. One receives little more than peanuts, and full meals may not be offered even in first class. You have to fight with your fellow passengers for overhead space, which may not be even theoretically sufficient. Computer foibles and extreme-weather events ground entire fleets. But perhaps the worst thing about flying in the year 2024 is that it’s not at all distinctive. Whichever airline you decide to book, your experience will be more or less the same (and more or less no good).
This sad fact was made apparent once again yesterday, when Southwest Airlines announced that it will, after more than half a century, begin assigning seats. I happened to abhor its “open seating” policy, but one cannot deny that it was unique. No other major U.S. carrier did the same. Southwest informalized the boarding process. In the 1980s and ’90s, during the airline’s post-deregulation period of rapid expansion, its planes were less jam-packed than they are today, and open seating made them feel more like one continuous space than a hall of isolating seat-cells. Railroad-style rows, one forward-facing and one backward-facing, allowed families or larger groups to sit together and commune.
Over the past 15 years, as other airlines charged higher rates for any seat that does not completely suck, Southwest’s open-seating policy, like its absence of “first class,” felt egalitarian: Everyone had an equal shot at whichever seat they wanted, so long as they checked in at the proper time. And flights were cheap enough that almost anyone could afford them. For that price, you got a soda, a bag of peanuts, and nothing else. This we’re-all-the-same conceit did lose some credibility as the rules were tweaked: Southwest ended up allowing passengers to pay an extra fee for earlier boarding, pre-board under dubious pretenses, or save seats for others. But it still felt different from the other carriers—and more equitable.
Whatever your attitude toward unassigned seating, its time has ended. The boarding process has become just one more aspect of flying that is pretty much the same for every airline. Delta just changed its own boarding method from groups organized by status and class to numbered zones, just like United’s and American’s. American and other airlines have started handing out the Biscoff cookies that used to be distinctive to Delta. As even paid-for meal boxes in coach have dwindled, any sense of affinity for a particular cheese plate or croissant sandwich is now moot. Southwest once encouraged its flight attendants to make jokes, and Delta tried out a meme-filled safety video, but I’ve found that even these modest attempts to alleviate the stress of flying seem less common now. In-flight entertainment has also flattened out. United and Delta distinguish themselves from American by offering seat-back entertainment screens on most planes, but many people use their own devices (which are also all the same) instead. In-flight magazines are disappearing too, along with whatever editorial choices might have made one airline’s magazine different from another’s.
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The differentiation that we used to have arose from healthy competition. Dozens of medium-size airlines used to service the United States, along with a few truly transcontinental carriers, such as Trans World Airlines (TWA) and Pan American World Airways. Evidence of this history persists in the very name Southwest, which initially served just Texas and was mostly confined to the actual American Southwest until the mid-1980s. The same was true of Eastern Airlines, as well as Western, Northwest, Southern, and America West, to name a few. In 1984, 14 different carriers transported more than 10 million passengers each to their destinations, and at least another 16 carried more than 1 million. Today, the top-four carriers, American, Southwest, Delta, and United, account for 73 percent of seats in the air.
In the old days, many of the airlines had overlapping routes. Until 1978, they could not compete on price, so they did instead by vibe. Braniff Airlines flew with bright and variously colored fuselages: orange, red, yellow, avocado. Its flight attendants wore swoopy prints designed by Emilio Pucci. TWA embraced modernism with its terminals designed by Minoru Yamasaki in St. Louis and Eero Saarinen in New York. Even after deregulation, some differences of branding and environment remained. United still sported a Saul Bass–designed orange-and-blue-striped livery; American’s planes were kept in natural silver, adorned with a red, white, and blue racing stripe. Eastern Airlines’ interiors once featured red, purple, and goldenrod animal-print seats.
Now almost every carrier flies white planes with gray or blue seats. On board, the seat pitch is similarly narrow on every airline; the entertainment offerings, now streamed to your phone, are mostly the same; and the meal service is identical (which is to say, there isn’t any). You sit there while your human body is hurled through the air at 500 miles per hour, a wonder that has become somehow both ordinary and homogenous.
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Airports have also come to look the same. In part, that’s because bankruptcy and consolidation led to the abandonment of hubs in Memphis, Cincinnati, and many other midsize cities. Airline-owned terminals, such as the Saarinen Trans World Flight Center, are less common; instead, the biggest airlines work with municipal owners to “update” terminals such that they resemble every other updated terminal. (One major exception, LaGuardia Airport’s carnivalesque Terminal B, is operated by a Canadian airport-management conglomerate.)
Sometimes I gaze longingly at old TWA route maps, noting all the places one used to be able to fly direct from my home city of St. Louis. Southwest is now our biggest carrier, occupying most of the old Yamasaki terminal like Mello Yello in a wine glass. Now that it’s a top-four carrier, Southwest no longer has to offer discount prices. The reasons to choose its flights over any other have been dwindling. I certainly still appreciate its policy of free checked baggage. Then again, I’m also fond of Delta’s free in-flight Wi-Fi, even if it doesn’t always work. But these are barely shades of difference. With the end of Southwest’s open seating, one of the very few distinguishing features left among domestic airlines has been erased. Once a miracle, flight has turned into a commodity.
