10 Reasons Why Southwest Is the Best Airline Ever

3 comments | Mar 10, 02:23 PM | best-of-earl | by Earl Creps

1. The Wardrobe: Flight attendants wearing shorts in March tells me everything is going to be allllllriiiiiight.

2. The Humor: When the pilot over the PA refers to the female flight attendant performing the seatbelt ritual as “my ex-wife or my girlfriend…you decide,” I know I’m flying with a crew that appreciates irony…the signature trait of an airline that gets it. The more mundane the announcement, the funnier they become.

3. The Honesty: When the crew announces that Southwest no longer accepts cash for drink and food purchases on board, they make no pretense of apologizing for this fact, or for the too-high prices of those items. Everyone knows that airline apologies are our culture’s new benchmark for insincerity. They mean about as much as apologies from celebrities going into rehab. Southwest seems to know this too, and simply doesn’t repent. I respect that. (Bonus: If you haven’t seen the “Vanilla Ice Says, ‘Sorry’” video, get over there right now. If you are under 35 and don’t know who Vanilla Ice is, read the Wikipedia article before watching the video.)

SW seems to recognize that a commercial aircraft is no longer a sort of cruise ship with wings. It’s uncomfortable, often unpleasant, and sometimes downright nasty. So rather than pretending we’re being treated like royalty (or like hedge fund managers), feeding us drivel about what a pleasure our company has been during this three hour ride in an airborne cattle car, SW mocks itself (“No matter where you put your baggage, it will arrive in LA at the same time you do.”). By so doing, the airline insinuates its understanding of how tough this experience is for everyone, a vibe that tends to make those of us strapped into the seats feel that air travel is something done with passengers not to them. The result: I find the anger quotient usually lower on SW flights.

4. The Peanuts: This airline may be the only one that still hands me a bag of 8 honey roasted peanuts while asking for nothing in return except for the implication that I book SW for my next flight…which I will, bypassing the airlines that feature grim-faced flight attendants being forced to charge me for water by executives that don’t have the courage to face real passengers.

5. The Boarding: Of the many airlines I have flown, only Southwest uses a Reaganomics (supply side) approach to seating allowing customers to choose their own chairs—within very broad limits. Without fail, those who board first select the aisle and window seating, dooming those who follow to the dreaded middle position. This exercise is the best demonstration I know of what’s called “spontaneous organization,” the ability of people to create a structured experience out of nothing but opportunity + intellect. The market loves the aisle, I guess because I’ll have a potential stalker on only one side of me.

6. The Humility: Regardless of how wide the quality margin between Southwest and other carriers, there is never a word spoken about it. Comparison to the competition just doesn’t seem to be part of their culture, a very appealing trait in an era of negative campaigning, negative advertising, negative, well, negative.

7. The Simplicity: If you’ve seen Jim Collins’ “Good to Great” video, you know that he uses SW as one of his primary examples, describing their “profit per fuselage” way of measuring the productivity of the company. While I’m sure managing the enterprise is as complex as any other, this simple benchmark gives the SW leadership a way of turning a movie into a snapshot, one image that defines how things are going overall. I think it’s a big factor in the quality of service they deliver. Other airlines seem to use more of a “misery per fuselage” index.

8. The Schedule: Very rarely do I find myself on a SW flight that feels like a marathon. Their approach is more distributive than centralized, resulting in a cluster of shorter hops rather than mega-flights that seem longer than a Yanni concert. That’s fine if I’m flying direct to London, but not cool when I want to get from Oakland to, say, Kansas City. The big carriers with their hub and spoke model (aka “you’re going to Denver whether you need to or not”) just do not get this. Their paradigm clocked out so long ago I doubt many of them will survive in the long-term.

9. The Details: As we are about to deplane, the pilot tells us to check for articles left behind. His reason: SW collects 1100 cell phones per month left behind by passengers. At this rate, I reason, it would only take about 900 months for a million mobile phones to end up in the possession of this airline. Of course, by that time, Apple would have an iPhone embedded in all of our brains. In any event, this airline lost-and-found tidbit told me that someone at SW is paying attention.

10. The Art: Several of the pre-flight and post-flight instructions are given to us in the form of songs sung by the crew over the PA, some reminiscent of the “I Love Battlestar Galactica” song on Youtube.

Other briefings are delivered in poetic forms featuring iambic pentameter. The more boring the information, the more lyrical the delivery vehicle.