July 10, 2006

I like cattle?

The Dallas Morning News reports that Southwest Airlines will launch a pilot program today (pun intended) to assign seats to passengers instead of herding everyone like cattle. Starting today, some Southwest flights from San Diego will give out assigned seats.

(As a side note, the newspaper also says Southwest gets wedding invitations from passengers who met through open seating. How does one invite an airliner to a wedding? Is the ceremony held in a hangar? Haha.)

While Southwest experiments with assigned seating, Northwest Airlines is doing the exact opposite:

Northwest is testing a new policy in which coach passengers
have seat assignments but board in the order they line up at the gate.

To sum up: Southwest is trying to be more like Northwest. And Northwest is trying to be more like Southwest.

3 comments:

Josh said...

Won't somebody please think of Sacramento? They're an innocent victim, caught in the middle of this lame joke.

Tom said...

I prefer Southwest's method simply because it provies decent training if the world ever descends into anarchy. First-time Southwest fliers are horrified by the system. You'd think they were going to have to jump on the outisde of a bus.

Eric said...

Crap, I'm flying SWA into (and out of) San Diego this weekend. I wonder if I like cattle enough to be herded into a specific seat ...