Are You Weirdly Obsessed with Southwest Airlines?

 

Thank you Matt Melzer and Thrillist for allowing me

to share about how Southwest Airlines saved my trip!

There’s no charge to change a flight. So if you, like Los Angeles travel agent Lisa Niver, found that you’d booked a ticket in the wrong direction for a professional conference, you can change it without coughing up a $200 fee. When she realized the day before said conference she’d bought a ticket from Phoenix to LA instead of the other way around, she rebooked at the last minute at no extra cost.

Are You Weirdly Obsessed with Southwest Airlines?

Thrillist

 

An airline that doesn’t jack you around for making basic changes

The benefits of happy, empowered employees extend beyond just free drinks. Reservation agents can, as they did for Mariah Muhlbradt of Boulder, Colorado, even waive large differences in base fare if you, say, booked a ticket on the wrong date for your best friend’s wedding, and only realize it the day before, when all the available flights are $500 more expensive.

“They can bend the rules when they need to,” says Lauren Tow, a Dallas attorney who says she’s flown the airline more than 1,200 times. “You just don’t see that in other airlines — there it’s all about policy and ‘sorry, we can’t do that.’”

At first glance, it might seem cutting customers big breaks for their own errors isn’t good for business. Instead, it breeds loyalty, which drives profits. And when we asked a handful of flight attendants what they’d do to improve the airline industry, they all agreed that giving passengers increased flexibility to change or cancel a flight — as Southwest has done — would go a long way in improving the flying experience as a whole for customers and FAs alike.

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Lisa Ellen Niver

Lisa Niver is an award-winning travel expert who has explored 102 countries on six continents. This University of Pennsylvania graduate sailed across the seas for seven years with Princess Cruises, Royal Caribbean, and Renaissance Cruises and spent three years backpacking across Asia. Discover her articles in publications from AARP: The Magazine and AAA Explorer to WIRED and Wharton Magazine, as well as her site WeSaidGoTravel. On her award nominated global podcast, Make Your Own Map, Niver has interviewed Deepak Chopra, Olympic medalists, and numerous bestselling authors, and as a journalist has been invited to both the Oscars and the United Nations. For her print and digital stories as well as her television segments, she has been awarded three Southern California Journalism Awards and two National Arts and Entertainment Journalism Awards and been a finalist twenty-two times. Named a #3 travel influencer for 2023, Niver talks travel on broadcast television at KTLA TV Los Angeles, her YouTube channel with over 2 million views, and in her memoir, Brave-ish, One Breakup, Six Continents and Feeling Fearless After Fifty.

One response to “Are You Weirdly Obsessed with Southwest Airlines?

  1. People don’t realize the effect that Southwest has had on the global airline industry. If it wasn’t for them and the business model they’ve mastered, there would be no RyanAir or EasyJet in Europe, AirAsia in Asia (go figure) and Fly Dubai in the Middle East. Each of these airlines have employed, to one degree of success or another, the Southwest model allowing millions of people the chance to travel on the cheap.

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