TXTransplant said:

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The only reason I want to board early is strictly to insure I have bin space for my carry on. That's it. I refuse to check bags on domestic flights (and rarely on international).

Whether or not FAs enforce overhead bin "rules" is a crapshoot. Usually it's a free for all, with people putting anything and everything in the overhead bin and nothing under the seat. And they put their stuff in random places in the aircraft rather than near their seat.

I have seen the "rules" being enforced more lately. FAs seem to be policing people who put their personal item in the bin instead of under the seat. And a FA on our flight last night made some in my group take their bags out of the bin when they put them in the first open bin space (rather than where they were sitting). But until the airlines are consistent with this, it will be a source of frustration for those of us who carry on.

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My problem with some of that is that if I check a bag and board the plane with just a backpack, I am going to put that backpack in the overhead bin. It is my "carryon" at that point, not my "personal item", and my ticket paid for one carryon in the overhead bins just like everybody else who didn't buy basic economy. Why should I have to cramp my legs for several hours with a backpack stuffed around my feet when I checked my larger bag instead of carrying it on?

As for how to make it different, if they boarded by sections of rows from the back to the front instead of the random scattershot they do now, they could open up only the bins for those rows and one of the FAs could stand in the row in front of wherever they are boarding and stop people from opening bins and putting bags in the bins outside of that section of rows.

To address the items going in the bins, give each person with a non-basic economy ticket one tag for their "carryon" and those tagged bags are the only ones allowed in the bins. Easy task for the FA to look for non-tagged bags if there is a shortage of space and remove them from the bins. People who check their main bag can use their tag on their backpack or briefcase and put it in the overhead bins without being hassled about it.

I don't have an issue with a personal item in the overhead, if that passenger doesn't also have another carry on in the bin. It's the people who put all their crap in the overhead that bug me.

I agree, something needs to be done about it. I was just thinking, what if they partition the bins and label them with the seat number. Meaning you can put whatever you want in the section of the bin that matches your seat number. Way more complicated than what you are suggesting, but the point is to make sure certain passengers aren't taking up 2-3x more overhead space than others.

Frankly, however, if FAs would just do their job during boarding, this wouldn't be an issue.

Next move is to start moving Economy perks to Basic Economy and starting to charge for carry on if you don't have status or CC. It's only a matter of time before they only allow an unpaid personal item for free.

TXTransplant said:

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I don't have an issue with a personal item in the overhead, if that passenger doesn't also have another carry on in the bin. It's the people who put all their crap in the overhead that bug me.

I agree, something needs to be done about it. I was just thinking, what if they partition the bins and label them with the seat number. Meaning you can put whatever you want in the section of the bin that matches your seat number. Way more complicated than what you are suggesting, but the point is to make sure certain passengers aren't taking up 2-3x more overhead space than others.

Frankly, however, if FAs would just do their job during boarding, this wouldn't be an issue.

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If they would quit charging people for their first checked bag and just raise the ticket price by $10, they would stop the absurdity of most people trying to carry everything but their kitchen sink on the plane with them. Would free up a ton of bin space. Would also speed up the airport security lines by having fewer people with bags full of crap that isn't allowed in a carryon.

Bayou City said:

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Next move is to start moving Economy perks to Basic Economy and starting to charge for carry on if you don't have status or CC. It's only a matter of time before they only allow an unpaid personal item for free.

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I think I know what you mean, but United basic economy already doesn't allow a full-sized carry on for domestic flights (there are some exceptions for international). It's personal item under the seat only. And if I'm not mistaken, there is no way to upgrade or pay to be able to take a full-sized carry on - except to purchase an economy ticket in the first place. You can pay to check a bag with basic economy fare.

I think what you're trying to say is there may be a day when no one will be allowed a free full size carry on unless they have status or cc. I can see that, too. But, it seems like there are still a lot of flights where very few passengers have status (ie, the situation with AA out of IAH - no one flies AA out of IAH unless that's their only option).

European airlines already do this. We flew EuroJet, I think. And we paid extra to bring full-sized carry ons. They had other pricing options for various combos of luggage type and seat location/selection.

The ticket prices were so cheap that I didn't mind the add ons. Problem in the US is, it's getting harder and harder to find a decent ticket for <$400. For that kind of pricing, I don't want to be nickel and dimed.

I didn't get to bed until almost 4 am, so maybe I'm confused. Or maybe we are on the same page and my brain is too slow.

Isn't charging extra for full-sized carry ons supposed to deter people from bringing a carry on bag?

The issue I see is, if I'm going to have to pay to check a bag AND pay to bring a carry on, I will pay to bring the carry on 10 times out of 10. And that's not a model that any US airlines use anyway.

I also don't want to pay for anything (seat, checked bag, carry on bag) when a domestic r/t ticket is $400+.

I think the whole reason European airlines are able to get away with all the fees is because tickets are so cheap to begin with. We just don't see that kind of pricing here in the US (except for very limited scenarios that are likely to involve Spirit airlines).

TXTransplant said:

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I didn't get to bed until almost 4 am, so maybe I'm confused. Or maybe we are on the same page and my brain is too slow.

Isn't charging extra for full-sized carry ons supposed to deter people from bringing a carry on bag?

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Not sure what reply you were reading, but the one above yours says
"We should be charging for carryons and making checked bags (at least the first one) free. The fewer bags people carry through security and try to fit into the bins on the plane, the better. "

The idea is to have people check, not carry on. It's faster boarding, and less issue with running out of space.

Status or CC holders should be the only ones who can carry a bag on free. Charge everyone else $50, and it all goes away.

Yeah, I was advocating charging for carryons instead of checked bags. Not charging for both. However, I think the airlines are making too much money off of all the jockeying for status to improve boarding groups to willingly give up the one thing that is driving it all (lack of overhead bin space).

Yes, I understand what the post was saying. What I didn't understand was why it was in reply to my post - which basically says the same thing without saying it directly.

I didn't explicitly say airlines should charge for full-sized carry ons, but that's basically why my posts were describing (only status get s free carry ons and the euro airlines already do this). So I was wondering if the other poster was misunderstanding what I said.

I just don't necessarily see the carry on charge happening with US airlines, since, except for SW, they all already charge for checked bags. As I said above, if I have to pay either way, I'm gonna pay for the carry on every time.

The reason the carry on charge works in Europe is because their fares are already much lower than ours.

When base fare is $400+, and you charge to pick a seat, and you charge to check a bag, and (as a scenario in this discussion) you charge to carry on a bag, ticket prices get real expensive real fast.

I do agree that the US model of charging for checked bags wad a mistake. They should have charged for carry ons instead.

txags92 said:

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Yeah, I was advocating charging for carryons instead of checked bags. Not charging for both. However, I think the airlines are making too much money off of all the jockeying for status to improve boarding groups to willingly give up the one thing that is driving it all (lack of overhead bin space).

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We are on the same page.

Charging for checked bags in the first place was a mistake, but good luck putting that genie back in the bottle.

TXTransplant said:

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Yes, I understand what the post was saying. What I didn't understand was why it was in reply to my post - which basically says the same thing without saying it directly.

I didn't explicitly say airlines should charge for full-sized carry ons, but that's basically why my posts were describing (only status get s free carry ons and the euro airlines already do this). So I was wondering if the other poster was misunderstanding what I said.

I just don't necessarily see the carry on charge happening with US airlines, since, except for SW, they all already charge for checked bags. As I said above, if I have to pay either way, I'm gonna pay for the carry on every time.

The reason the carry on charge works in Europe is because their fares are already much lower than ours.

When base fare is $400+, and you charge to pick a seat, and you charge to check a bag, and (as a scenario in this discussion) you charge to carry on a bag, ticket prices get real expensive real fast.

I do agree that the US model of charging for checked bags wad a mistake. They should have charged for carry ons instead.

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Yeah just to clarify, I was agreeing with your idea of charging for carryons, but pointing out that to make it work, the checked bags needed to be free…or at least significantly cheaper than the carryon fee.

I agree it is unlikely one of the major carriers will be the first to change their model.

TXTransplant said:

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txags92 said:

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Yeah, I was advocating charging for carryons instead of checked bags. Not charging for both. However, I think the airlines are making too much money off of all the jockeying for status to improve boarding groups to willingly give up the one thing that is driving it all (lack of overhead bin space).

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We are on the same page.

Charging for checked bags in the first place was a mistake, but good luck putting that genie back in the bottle.

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A tax-law loophole
Airlines pay the federal government 7.5% of the ticket price when flying people domestically, alongside other fees. The airlines dislike these charges, with their trade association arguing that they boost the cost to the consumer of a typical air ticket by around one-fifth.
However, the US Code of Federal Regulations specifically excludes baggage from the 7.5% transportation tax as long as "the charge is separable from the payment for the transportation of a person and is shown in the exact amount."
This means if an airline charges a combined $300 to fly you and a bag round-trip within the US, it owes $22.50 in tax. If the airline charges $220 to fly you plus separately charges $40 each way for the bag, then your total cost is the same but the airline only owes the government $16.50 in taxes. Splitting out baggage charges saves the airline $6.

txags92 said:

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Yeah, I was advocating charging for carryons instead of checked bags. Not charging for both. However, I think the airlines are making too much money off of all the jockeying for status to improve boarding groups to willingly give up the one thing that is driving it all (lack of overhead bin space).

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We are still not that far out from Covid, so I wonder if long-term this status situation is going to be as lucrative as the airlines think.

Most people with status have it because they at least do some business travel. That's down, and may never return to what it was pre-Covid. There are probably a lot of people still traveling off of their pre-Covid status, but I imagine that will eventually go away. And airlines are making it harder and harder to achieve and keep status.

I don't think most recreational travelers have status (unless they have an airline cc).
1) they don't travel enough,
2) they aren't traveling to the same destinations like a business traveler would, so they can't always use the same airline,
3) inflation/ticket prices is really making it difficult to make multiple recreational trips in a year, and
4) the multiple massive meltdowns and absolute misery of traveling the last 18 months or so I think will eventually take a toll on people - don't get me wrong, a lot of people will still travel, but there will be longer periods of time between when people will fly again (get stuck in an airport for 3 days, and a lot of people won't get on a plane again for a while).

The hub method that most legacy airlines use actually hurts recreational travelers. I want to go a lot of places that United simply doesn't fly to out of IAH. If they can't get me there, or of their itinerary involves an overnight layover or airport change, I'm not flying with them.

That's another thing that often makes SW a good option - there are usually multiple different options to get from point A to point B, if you are flexible enough to have a stopover. I find the flights on United and AA out of IAH that have connections are often terrible - connection times of 40 min or 15 hours and nothing in between.

This is why I came to like/appreciate the SW option to upgrade to A group at check in. It basically gave every one equal opportunity to reap the perks of "status", and it was usually only $20/leg. If you're flying direct, that's nothing. And be able to do it at check in means you can see your boarding position and sort of do a quick cost-benefit analysis in your head.

I think the airlines went hard on getting people into airline points credit cards using status offers during covid as a way to get more people flying, but to also get the income from the card interest to offset covid losses. There are a lot of recreational flyers with status only via their credit card's initial offer or through CC spend points. The airlines have already started to make status harder to get purely through CC spend and I think they will continue to devalue that line as their flights get more and more full of non-full revenue flyers.

I am with you on how convenient and easy SW can be, but they have been totally unreliable and pretty unrepentant about it on the last several trips my wife and I have taken with them. Until they get back to being able to reliably get me where I am going without multiple flight itinerary changes, cancellations, or late flights resulting in strandings, I will only be using the points I have with them for single leg flight vacations or giving points to family members to use for their trips. When I have over 200k points with them, it does me no good to get a $200 voucher that I can only use for more SW flights when they leave me stranded, costing me $300+ in real money to pay for extra hotel rooms and rental car costs.

Same for planning a trip and then having them make unilateral changes to my flights because they are cancelling flights. If I plan a long weekend trip going out Thursday evening and coming back Monday night, if they change my flights to go out early in the day on Thursday because they cancelled the late flight, then I am out an extra day of vacation and might have gotten a better/cheaper non-stop on another airline if I had wanted to go earlier in the day. If they do that on the Monday flights, then I lose nearly a full day I had planned for the vacation or have to add extra nights and a vacation day on the end if there was a reason I needed to stay through Monday. It may seem like simple flight changes to them, but it costs me money or lost time on one end or the other nearly every time they do it. And they are unapologetic about doing it and think that allowing you to change flights for free is good enough compensation (even if their schedule doesn't have anything approximating the initial itinerary available).

Your experience with SW is similar to the experience we've had with AA the last two years.

I normally take the first flight out in the am to start a vacation. AA is terrible about cancelling flights after you've gone to bed for the night.

They did it to us this trip (and we thought they were gonna do it last year, too, but they wound up flying two planes to PHL at basically the exact same time). BF was on the phone with them at 1 am, and after arguing, got them to put us on JetBlue because AA couldn't get us rebooked for 2 days. Supposedly the cancellation was due to no crew.

Pushed our 730 am departure back to noon, AND we had to fly to an airport with a 3 hour drive to our destination. And the rental car doubled in price when I changed the pick up location.

So, we lost all of day 1 to travel, not getting to our destination until 10 pm instead of mid-afternoon, and it cost us more money.

Then on two return flights now they've had cancellation/weather issues. One last year stranded us in PHL for the night and we had to fly PHL->DFW->IAH to get home. Flight yesterday was cancelled (no plane, and then CLT had a ground stop for weather), but we saw the writing on the wall and moved to a different flight. But that flight was delayed by 6 hours. Didn't depart CLT until after 1 am and didn't get home until almost 4 am.

I've never had SW cancel on me, except for the great holiday meltdown of 2022.

BF put in a complaint on the cancelled AA flight at the start of this trip. We will see if they compensate us.

I think you're right about the cc status offers. But I don't think most people are going to keep that up, if they aren't business travelers. Too many incentives to change cards when you run up your balance and need to get that interest rate back to 0. Or just flat out forget to use the card.

BMX Bandit said:

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barbacoa taco said:

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TXTransplant said:

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Paying more to sit closer to the front of the plane is stupid, and I hate when other airlines charge for that.

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Yeah, it's like people think they're getting to the destination faster by sitting closer to the front. The only time this would make sense is if you need to make a tight connection.

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disagree here.

well worth it to get off the plane and where you are going as quickly as possible. it can be a 20 minute difference in getting off the plane.

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Perfect example from earlier this week. I had to take a SWA flight, was running late headed back to airport and ended up sitting row 30.

It took 21 minutes to get off the plane.
It took 14 minutes from being off the jetway to walk to my car and pay for parking.

So a person in row 3 could be almost to the interstate before a person in the back even got off the plane.

Yep.

The big question is how Southwest will ensure that their most active customers still have last-minute access to those seats now that they have been assigned in advance.

Flew Southwest last weekend down to Pensacola. First leg of the trip went Dallas to Houston then Houston to Pensacola. The flight from Dallas to Houston was the hottest airplane I've ever been on. Not sure what was going on, but with the limited time in the air it never really cooled down.

Thought it was a one time thing, then flying back direct from Pensacola to Dallas, airplane was hot AF as well. Not as bad as the original Dallas to Houston flight (plus it had more time in the air to cool down), but definitely not comfortable at all.

Probably the first two times in my flying career (that I can remember) that I didn't put my hoodie on that I always put in my carry on bag.

I'm talking completely sweat through my shirt both flights.

Weird. I had a flight last week in Europe from Brussels to Genoa on KLM and same thing. Hottest plane I've ever been on. It was brutal.

Boarding to ATL right now and I'm A20. There are more people in wheelchairs than in front of me. He just asked if any wheelchair people felt they could safely walk then please do so because the SW employee is by himself. All but 2 of them popped up and walked on.

CanyonAg77 said:

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I pity folks who missed the early outlaw days of Southwest. Well, except for the smoking section. They opened airline travel up to almost everyone with their cheap fares. Fly one type of plane, fill it up, and fly often.

It made it like catching a bus. If you get to the airport early, they'd let you take an earlier flight if there were seats. No fees, no muss, no fuss. Miss your scheduled flight, catch the next one.

And flying SW as a teenage male was fantastic

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These ladies still fly for Southwest.

duck79 said:

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Boarding to ATL right now and I'm A20. There are more people in wheelchairs than in front of me. He just asked if any wheelchair people felt they could safely walk then please do so because the SW employee is by himself. All but 2 of them popped up and walked on.

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I've never seen so many wheelchair folks on a flight as when I'm flying Houston to Vegas. It's crazy.

BMX Bandit said:

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BMX Bandit said:

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barbacoa taco said:

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TXTransplant said:

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Paying more to sit closer to the front of the plane is stupid, and I hate when other airlines charge for that.

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Yeah, it's like people think they're getting to the destination faster by sitting closer to the front. The only time this would make sense is if you need to make a tight connection.

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disagree here.

well worth it to get off the plane and where you are going as quickly as possible. it can be a 20 minute difference in getting off the plane.

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Perfect example from earlier this week. I had to take a SWA flight, was running late headed back to airport and ended up sitting row 30.

It took 21 minutes to get off the plane.
It took 14 minutes from being off the jetway to walk to my car and pay for parking.

So a person in row 3 could be almost to the interstate before a person in the back even got off the plane.

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100%

lazuras_dc said:

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duck79 said:

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Boarding to ATL right now and I'm A20. There are more people in wheelchairs than in front of me. He just asked if any wheelchair people felt they could safely walk then please do so because the SW employee is by himself. All but 2 of them popped up and walked on.

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I've never seen so many wheelchair folks on a flight as when I'm flying Houston to Vegas. It's crazy.

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Yet, there's something magical about that flight because when it lands the majority of those same people can walk off the plane.

Jetway Jesus