Southwest Airlines finally has some good news for passengers

Sometimes the worst of intentions have positive side effects. It’s not common, but it can happen, like if someone has a car accident that lands them in the emergency room, but while they’re getting treated, the doctor sees a cancer that otherwise would have gone undetected.

Nobody wants to be in a car accident, but if it ends up saving your life in a roundabout way, then it was actually a good thing.

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Southwest Airlines (LUV) has not done many intentionally good things recently. The company has abandoned its long-held position of being the airline that doesn’t hit passengers with added fees.

The airline that once prided itself on the idea that “bags fly free” will soon charge for bags. It now also charges separate WiFi fees for each leg of the same trip and will soon add expiration dates for flight credits.

Related: United just cut a bunch of flights during hours many depend on

In addition, the airline is in the midst of its first-ever layoff, which comes following incredibly contentious labor negotiations with its pilots’ union.

To complete the heel turn, however, Southwest is working on getting rid of its mostly democratic boarding and seating process. It’s also including added-legroom seats as it moves toward dropping its “sit in any open seat” seating rules in favor of selling assigned seats.

As that’s occurring, however, there’s actually something good that will happen for passengers.

Southwest is retrofitting its planes

Before Southwest begins selling seating assignments, it needs to retrofit older planes with the new cabin arrangements. As that happens, there will be a period during which seats are still being sold on a first-come, first-served basis.

That means for at least a short period of time, something positive will come from Southwest’s decision to put profits over its long-held reputation of caring about its customers. 

Southwest Chief Commercial Officer Ryan Green explained how the planes will be retrofitted during the airline’s fourth-quarter earnings call.

“We continue to make progress and move forward on our assigned and premium seating product and continue to expect to meet the financial targets and timelines we communicated at investor day. [We plan] to begin selling seat assignments in the second half of this year and operate flights [with] premium seating in the first half of next year,” he shared.

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The airline has only just begun the process and is taking a methodical approach to it.

“As we finalize our cabin layout and work toward FAA certification, we plan to begin retrofitting aircraft midyear, starting with our larger -800 aircraft, with the smaller 700s to follow later in the year. By beginning retrofits midyear, it allows us to meet our planned operate date,” he added.

Southwest will keep this bonus period short

While there will be a time when some Southwest planes have seats that feature added legroom without an extra charge, the airline plans to keep that period as short as possible. Green explained that the timeline Southwest is using actually took that into consideration.

“It minimizes the amount of time we have a mixed fleet, and it keeps the 700 aircraft flying with their current seat count for more of this year,” he said. 

The change, however, will happen by early 2026.

“We believe our tech ops facilities, employees, and vendors are well equipped to update our entire fleet within our timeline. Technology development is also going well. Our technology employees and vendors are hard at work, coding the necessary technological changes, and will soon begin a rigorous testing phase before we begin selling assigned seats,” he added.

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The airline is also taking steps to get its planes off the ground faster.

“Within the operation, we continue to focus on efficiency and modernization by reducing the time it takes to turn an aircraft and increasing our aircraft productivity. We’ve made meaningful progress toward our goal of removing paper-based processes from the day-to-day operation and have digitized crew paperwork,” he shared. 

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