Why Southwest Wants To Board Us More Slowly

The airline seat you choose can make a difference.

But it all depends on how the airline boards everyone.

Southwest recently announced that its boarding strategy will change. The switch will move them from the speediest approach to one that is slower.

Southwest’s Boarding Strategy

To simulate different boarding systems, MythBusters did a Discovery show with a mock plane that had 173 seats. As you can see (below), the back-to-front method is the slowest. With back-to-front, the aisle clogs because people in the middle seats are always getting up for the person near the window. Meanwhile, with WILMA, we would do window first, then middle seat, and last comes the aisle.

After back-to-front, the better alternatives are random line-up with assigned seats and then the WILMAs. But the fastest, used by Southwest, is entirely random order and no assigned seats. Entirely random works because any slowdown creates the incentive for people to quickly take the most accessible seat:

Knowing that their method is one of the least liked and that it might be more profitable to charge for desirable locations, Southwest will soon use a new (and for them revolutionary) boarding strategy.

Our Bottom Line: Productivity

An economist would say that Southwest is shifting the output from its land, labor, and capital. Called a change in total factor productivity, new procedures could add to turnaround time.

As a young airline with just three airplanes, getting out in 10 minutes gave them the equivalent of four or more planes. Even now, flying only 737s, they could standardize and expedite ground procedures that, listed below, range from fuel to food to baggage:

So where are we? We can just remember that because “planes don’t make money on the ground,” Southwest’s boarding time matters.

My sources and more: Thanks to Slate Money for inspiring today’s post on Southwest’s boarding strategy. Then, to get more of the boarding picture, a combination of Scientific American, WSJ, the points guy, and USA Today are possibilities. (Please note that several of today’s sentences were in a past econlife post.)