How Boarding Makes a Difference

Your airline seat matters:

And now, on Southwest, you can choose.

Airline Boarding

Southwest

In a new Super Bowl ad, Southwest makes fun of its 55-year-old open seating policy. Taking place in the middle of the jungle, “Boarding Royale,” shows the stress we felt from boarding without an assigned seat. Now, the fare we select will determine where we sit and when we board. The switch began last week.

For a smile, do take a look:

Leaving random seating, Southwest could choose from a slew of alternatives.

Boarding Alternatives

These are some of the possibilities:

• Front to back: Least popular; early boarders block those who follow them.
• Back to front: Very popular.
• Random: Check-in time is one way to decide boarding sequence; preferred by academics as one of the fastest approaches; entirely random works best because any slowdown creates the incentive for people to quickly take the most accessible seat.
• Rotating Zone: Alternating back and front for contiguous groups of seats.
• WILMA: Window first, then middle seat, and last comes the aisle.
• Reverse Pyramid Back-to-front with outside-in; unused.
• Flying Carpet (really?): Unused; designed by an Australian mechanical engineer; on a carpet with the seats drawn, a passenger stands on his/her own seat. After 20-30 people position themselves on the carpet, that group boards. Because there is no room for seatmates to stand next to each other, boarders automatically are dispersed for optimal boarding.

Our Bottom Line: Productivity

When an airline boards people more rapidly, it is utilizing land, labor and capital more efficiently. Best illustrated by the old Southwest Airlines, a fast turnaround means fewer airplanes are needed because more flights can be scheduled using the same equipment. Then, they wind up with extra land, labor, and capital that can be allocated elsewhere.

Shown by this bakery, factor productivity can be everywhere:

My sources and more: Presenting a different lens, this Adweek article is a good place to start for the Southwest story. Then, do look at our past post for some Southwest history. Also, you might enjoy the Southwest story on How I Built This. As for boarding, Scientific American had more.

Please note that several of today’s sentences were in a past econlife post.