Posted 9/21/2007 05:19:00 PM by Douglas

Southwest Airlines, in an attempt to make boarding their sky-bus as complicated as possible, has revised their A-B-C boarding groups into sub-groups. Still determined by the time you checked in, but now broken up into groups of five.

The boarding groups stay, too, but each passengers will, at check-in, be assigned a number. The number gives each member of the boarding groups a position in line for boarding the plane, eliminating the need to start standing in line early.

What the hell do you need to stand in line for? The only thing that could possible make a difference would be if you wanted two or (god forbid) three seats together. All of the A group would get a good chance of getting two or three seats, but after that, you're on your own, anyway. So why complicate things more by breaking up the 130 passengers from three groups to 26 groups of five?

This is stoopid. 80% of every SWA flight I've been on has been completely full, so at that point, what difference does it make? You're going to be sitting next to the smelly fat lady regardless of your boarding order, so what difference does it make? Also, most airports don't have the sufficient space to line up the passengers for a full 737, so the "is this the A line?" gets asked, oh, about 100 times or so. Now they're going to call groups of five? How much longer is that going to take? That will have to start about 30 minutes before departure. Ironically, the same time most of those idiots in 'A' spent standing in line. This is an improvement?

Look, if you want to speed up the boarding process, don't push the order back from the A-B-C setup to a ridiculous number based on what time you checked in. Here's an idea: How 'bout doing it based on picking your seat when you bought the freakin' ticket instead of letting angry travelers duke it out in the aisle? Most modern carriers refer to this as "assigned seating." Look into it, SWA, and save your money on cute little bullshit hype like this.