Is Southwest the best or the worst airline in the world?

Southwest Airlines has been at the front of my mind recently. My very last post, in fact, was about a Southwest flight to Florida I just took with my son. While it was a ridiculously stressful trip, the stress was mainly due to the fact that I had a newly-mobile child who was being forced to remain mostly immobile for about two and a half hours. In fact, I kept on saying that Southwest, with whom I had not flown in some time because they stopped having service in and out of the NYC area, was quickly becoming my favorite airline.

The past decade has been a rough one for air travel: prices have gone up, while service has gone down. The airlines are almost uniformly stripping us of amenities while simultaneously nickel and diming us for everything they can think of. Southwest, on the other hand, has been working on bucking the trend, offering free checked baggage and the ability to change your flight with very little stress. The trade-off, however, seems to be a high dose of public humiliation, given out seemingly at random.

I’m a huge fan of director Kevin Smith. For the past two years, roughly, his Smodcast has completely revolutionized my commute and my workouts. Yesterday, Smith took to his Twitter account and told his over 1.5 million followers that after he boarded a Southwest flight, he was then asked to disembark the plane, as he posed a “safety risk.” How can a famous director pose a safety risk on an airplane?

While it’s entirely possible, I suppose, that Smith had decided to get on this flight with a fistful of Oxycontin, which he was then sticking in caramels and delivering to the children on the plane, far more likely is his claim that the danger he posed was much simpler: Southwest deemed him too fat to fly. While this may seem like a crazy thing to have happen to anyone, much less someone famous like Smith, history backs his story up. Southwest was sued by a woman after a similar incident in 2003, and Southwest has a very detailed Q&A section on its website regarding this very issue.

Right or wrong, Southwest’s size policy has been in effect for over two decades, so that’s not the disturbing part of this story. In Southwest’s response to Smith posted on their blog and then quickly taken down (the link goes to the Google cached version), they say that Smith generally buys two seats when he travels with them, but “When the time came to board Mr. Smith, we had only a single seat available for him to occupy.” However, instead of saying, “dude, you’re on standby and we only have one seat. Try another flight, or perhaps a salad, fatty,” they allowed him to board and then kicked him off of the plane. Did the dude turn into Violet Beuregarde between the gate and the seat? Doubtful. So why did Southwest need to resort to public humiliation?

Southwest needed to get their shit together before they started boarding standby passengers. If they let him on and felt later that they made a mistake, then they need to deal with that in a way that puts the customer first, regardless of his or her size. This is something that Southwest should be better at than other airlines, yet they seem to consistently fail.

Southwest understands that paying for checked baggage sucks, so they don’t charge you. They understand that sometimes shit happens and you need to reschedule your flight. They don’t charge you for this– instead, you just pay any difference in the ticket price. They’ve even changed their cattle chute boarding process to a far more civilized zone seating process that allows you to freely walk around the airport instead of standing in line for hours, but still allows you to choose your own seat.

They do all this while still boasting impressively low prices. I had to fly down to Florida unexpectedly for a funeral, and I was able to buy a ticket from IAD to TPA on only two days notice for $99. That’s unheard of, and without that fare, I never would have been able to make it down. Southwest does a lot of things right, but it’s the one-on-one interactions in which they fail.

With their new boarding process, Southwest has eliminated pre-boarding for families with small children. As a mother who was flying by herself with her 16-month-old child, this proved to be disastrous. Instead of being allowed on the plane first, where I could put my stroller in the bag to be gate checked, I struggled to pack it away while waiting in line to board, so I wouldn’t hold up the crowd. While I was doing this, Cooper, no longer contained by the stroller, managed to get away from me, and for the better part of a minute, I had no idea where he was.

It was short, and everything worked out fine, but in that moment, I was living every parents worst nightmare. And for what? Would it be that much more difficult to let me down the tube so I can put my stroller away in a more enclosed environment, without having people trip over me?

But that’s the problem with Southwest: they do things that are seemingly too difficult for other airlines to do, like allow you to check bags for free, but can’t manage the simple things, like letting someone with a baby on first, or treating people with basic respect.

Kevin Smith is going to be fine. He’s going to pay a little more for those short flights to San Francisco and Las Vegas, and he’s going to move on with his life. But what about the rest of us? What do we do when we don’t want to support an airline who would kick someone off the plane for weighing an arbitrary amount, or for wearing a skirt that someone deemed too short, but we can’t afford to pay double or triple the fair that Southwest offers? We do what all middle-class people are forced to do in this country. We sigh, we rationalize, we admit defeat, and then we toast our position in the “A” boarding group.