Southwest Airlines has decided to change its seating on its Boeing aircraft to a thinner, lighter seat that permits an additional 6 seats on its airplanes.  Now, instead of 137 seats on its 737-700, they will have 143 seats.  I’m sure the “upgrade” will occur on its soon to arrive 737-800 aircraft as well. 

It’s a reasonable move on the part of SWA.  First, most trips on SWA are less than 2 hours in length which means even a slightly less comfortable seat is OK and probably doesn’t impact the customer much at all.  And we don’t know that the seats are less comfortable.  The truth is, the modern seating being offered for airliners looks uncomfortable but usually ends up retaining the same comfort levels.  This new seat doesn’t require SWA to reduce its seat pitch and that’s a good thing from my perspective.

The additional 6 seats potentially offer more profit for Southwest and it could use more profit.  While they continue to be the most consistently profitable airline, their costs are now in line with legacy airlines (mostly) and adding more profit to each full flight helps offset those costs.  Based on my own flights with Southwest, those 6 extra seats will contribute heavily to their bottom line as it has become rare for me to see a flight less than completely full.  In addition, Southwest’s load factors have soared over the past few years when they have traditionally been substantially less than legacy airlines.  Again, more seats helps here.

Southwest is also making its moves to integrate the Airtran system into the SWA system.  We’re now seeing Southwest announcing flights into Airtran cities on routes that are either the same or nearly the same as what Airtran had.  There are no surprises so far and I do think that Southwest is moving methodically along in its plans now that it has seniority agreements in place for both pilots and flight attendants from Airtran.  Southwest says it will take several years to integrate.  I think that Southwest will build steam quickly and end up integrating the substantial bulk of the two airlines faster than expected.  All indications point to Southwest growing quickly comfortable with the Airtran system and as they do grow more comfortable, decision making will happen more rapidly.

I also notice that Southwest is already getting aggressive on flying to Mexico using Airtan.  They’ve applied to serve new routes from several cities in the US and its notable that these routes do not seem to link up with Volaris routes in Mexico so far.  In other words, it appears that Southwest is keeping Volaris on board with existing services but exploring direct travel into Mexico via Airtran.  This isn’t out of character for Southwest, they like to experiment when opportunities arise to do so with little risk.

I do think that Southwest needs to decide how it wants to do foreign travel.  Will it be with partners or will it do it on itself?  Now that it has the international expertise of Airtran in its back pocket, I think they may be more interested in doing this themselves.  It is notable to me that despite the “codeshare” its doing with Volaris, Southwest hasn’t really worked too hard to expand it or promote it on a national basis.  That makes me wonder if both parties are less than satisfied with the relationship so far.

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