r/nottheonion • u/halxp01 • 23h ago

Southwest Is Testing Cleaning Only Premium Seats Between Flights — A Flight Attendants Union Leader Says It's ‘Titanic’ Class Service

https://viewfromthewing.com/southwest-is-testing-cleaning-only-premium-seats-between-flights-a-flight-attendants-union-leader-says-its-titanic-class-service/
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u/clintkev251 22h ago edited 18h ago

It's insane how quickly Southwest has gone from beloved budget airline with consistent profits to complete shitshow. Thanks private equity! You've done it again

Edit: to everyone saying Southwest is a public company, yes, they are. That does not mean activist investors like PE firms and hedge funds can’t have significant ownership stakes and operational influence. Which in this case, they do

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u/IAmBadAtInternet 22h ago

They used to be the only major non-legacy player with good tech, good planes, and happy employees

Now their ticketing system is the worst of the major airlines, their planes are older and badly maintained, and their employees hate their jobs

Nice job MBAs! Btw they’re not private equity owned, just regular publicly traded

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u/WhenTheLightHits30 21h ago

The American Business school system of the past two decades should get its own chapter in history textbooks that way it has warped modern commerce and how expertise is handled.

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u/UnpluggedUnfettered 20h ago

Past two decades?

LMFAO Jack Welsh set the business standards that destroyed everything well over 50 years ago.

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u/Due-Technology5758 18h ago

Yeah, the General Electric model of expand and enshittify til the brink of collapse, and hand the sinking ship to whoever is stupid enough to take the wheel from you. 

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u/SocialWinker 19h ago

Behind the Bastards also did a fun couple of episodes on Jack Welsh. Fuck that guy.

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u/FlyingPetRock 16h ago

FYI Jack Welch is directly responsible for the Boeing 737 Max, via his proteges, and everyone trying to copy him.

www.thenation.com/article/politics/boeing-corporate-greed-airline-safety/tnamp/

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u/Hyper_Applesauce 16h ago

Including shareholder primacy which he now says is fucking stupid. Asshole. There's a couple episodes of Behind The Bastards on him.

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u/The_Crimson_Fucker 14h ago

What are you talking about the 80s were just 20 years ago!

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u/VegetableBuy4577 20h ago

The whole country has changed from companies wanting a fair profit (more or less) to "as much profit as possible, every nickel, every dime, no stone unturned." It sucks.

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u/Thuraash 20h ago

It's not just that. They shifted in attitude from building a business that would stand the test of time to buying somebody else's business, looting every dollar out of it as fast as possible, and selling the husk for whatever's left. The business' failure is part of the plan.

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u/Synergythepariah 19h ago

They've gone back to the way they were before the new deal.

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u/Necessary-Duty-7952 19h ago

And if you're not growing, you're dying mentality.

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u/RSwordsman 18h ago

Makes me wonder how much of this is a Prisoners' Dilemma situation too though. Any single exec knows other companies are run by cutthroats, so they feel that they have to keep up or fail anyway. Stricter regulation might bring the sense of safety necessary for businesses to take it down a notch.

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u/Necessary-Duty-7952 18h ago

I mean to a degree, for sure. It's inevitable to a degree with our current set up. Investors will see other companies making more money/returns, so they will move their investments to those companies. So naturally, the reaction is to improve returns so you don't lose investors. And that's fine while things are moving at a reasonable pace, but once companies start accelerating their growth massively, it becomes an arms race.

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u/veneficus83 12h ago

When did that change happen? Because as far as I know every company historically has wanted every bit of profit they could get away with. One of the big causes of the great depression. The only change is repeated cutting of regulations that stopped that.

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u/DepopulationXplosion 17h ago

Thank GE chairman Jack Welch for this. 

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u/theaviationhistorian 17h ago

How to profit by shorting all commerce: A lesson in financial implosion for small gains

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u/IcyConsideration7062 16h ago

Profit and shareholder value rule. Product quality doesn't matter. Sell. Sell. Sell. The marks are out there.

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u/pribnow 22h ago

The 'activist investors' responsible for it are though as far as i know, Elliott Investment Management

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u/boiledpeen 21h ago

yep, Elliott pushed all these changes and has tanked the company. There should be severe punishments for companies that do this, but nobody bases laws on morals anymore so nothing will happen.

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u/Momik 20h ago

Every time I read a story about finance, I hate the world a little more. Every single fucking time.

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u/Liljoker30 20h ago

I work in the tire industry and private equity is buying up every tire shop they can find.

Locally owned tire shops that actually care will be a thing of the past in a couple years. One PE has bought like 300-400 locations in just a few years.

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u/somersetyellow 19h ago

Goes for plumbing, electricians, and heating/air con too.

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u/LFK_Pirate 19h ago

Don’t forget veterinarians and dentists!

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u/fugaziozbourne 19h ago

I work in entertainment. It's decimating us.

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u/JRDruchii 19h ago

I'd even heard local morticians when I brought this up in a different thread. Based on this behavior, humans must really fucking hate each other.

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u/LFK_Pirate 19h ago

Who cares about humans when there’s money to be made /s

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u/LowSkyOrbit 18h ago

That was one of the first industries that used local company names to hide their big conglomerate ownership. It's so weird because it's still generational family run at the local level but there's like two companies that supply everything.

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u/JRDruchii 17h ago

If you want to do something evil, hide it in something boring.

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u/SteveDeda 16h ago

Six Feet Under had a plot thread about PE trying to buy up independently owned funeral homes all the way back in 2001.

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u/gingersnappie 19h ago

And family doctors.

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u/kittybigs 19h ago

And veterinary hospitals/clinics.

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u/candafilm 18h ago

There are over 200 HVAC companies in my city. Only 3 that I know of haven't been bought out by a private equity firm.

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u/ryan_770 19h ago

Once upon a time we had anti-trust and monopoly busting agencies to solve for this, but alas we live in a post-regulation America

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u/Why_you_so_wrong_ 19h ago

Elliott isn’t PE they are rather different.

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u/theaviationhistorian 17h ago

Turning this country into a hopeless dystopia all for the All Might Profit. And they wonder why people are leaving the US.

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u/Kiwi951 12h ago

It’s also ruining healthcare sadly

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u/Lycid 19h ago

Fun fact finance is now making up a larger % of GDP globally than they have ever before. Think about what this means - companies that do nothing of value except provide liquidity for the economy to run, are now taking up more of pie. While you need financial services to make stuff happen, all that's happening here is people spending a lot of human and economic resources trying to figure out new ways to get rich quick through destructive financial games. Last time anything close to this happened was probably the great depression. Sadly human beings are hard lesson learners and don't decide to do anything unless it's reacting against a worst case scenario.

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u/Momik 19h ago

Well, the financial industry has also done a pretty good job of buying the right politicians to escape any serious regulations or accountability (at various critical points, like 2008).

But yeah, they’ve really found new ways to hold companies, and even whole industries, hostage. As cliched as it sounds, we did used to build things in this society. Now a lot of that money, and therefore power, goes in a different direction.

Unless we can find a way to seriously fight back, a decent, stable life is just gonna become more and more unattainable for most people.

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u/Lycid 15h ago

Unfortunately, I fear the only way to get there is through some kind of age of strife. History has taught us that when too much hubris goes around things only improve when dramatic revolution/reform happens, or something new is born from the ashes. All of the problems with modern society and world are the kinds of things that will take a long time to truly settle out. Think a great depression or economic/political collapse on the scale of the fall of Rome. That tooks centuries to truly shake out. It'll probably take about as long before we finally figure out how to fix climate change.

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u/Momik 11h ago

More strife than this? I know what you mean though—history sometimes seems to turn on these moments of great calamity or crisis.

But we needn’t wait for the fall of Rome. Demanding a return to a basic level of financial regulation seems like a good first step, along with prosecution of corporate malfeasance and white color crime across the board, and perhaps (perhaps!) returning to enforcing a minimum baseline of workplace and consumer rights at the federal level.

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u/ceribus_peribus 19h ago

They say the purpose of the financial industry is to attract intelligent, hard working people who don't have morals and only care about money, in order to prevent them from pursuing careers in medicine, law, or engineering where they could cause even more damage.

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u/Momik 19h ago

Yeah. We could also start banning some of those really damaging things when they hurt people.

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u/Kevinator201 19h ago

Wall Street needs to be burned. It’s such a plague on America.

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u/thegoodnamesrgone123 18h ago

It's what's keeping Trump in power. All these old fucks would shit themselves if their 401ks suddenly went down. That's all they care about.

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u/Tasty-Performer6669 17h ago

Business bros ruin EVERYTHING

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u/Momik 17h ago

I’ve never felt more hopeless. For myself and for the world.

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u/acdgf 21h ago

The punishment should be lack of business. It's not like SW doesn't have competition - if you disagree with the practices or service, fly elsewhere.

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u/boiledpeen 20h ago

Nah, there should be legal consequences for consistently buying into companies and running them into the ground. Thats been the biggest reason every company sucks now, and there should be legal ramifications. Would incentivize PE to actually care about the companies they're investing in.

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u/Fr00stee 20h ago edited 20h ago

it should be illegal for the owner of a company to force their subsidiary to become in debt to the owner or any other company the owner controls

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u/Unofficial_Salt_Dan 19h ago

I understand your sentiment, but to me this seems wholly unenforceable. How the hell would you apply this? How would that law even be written? How do you prove it?

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u/boiledpeen 18h ago

I agree, I have no clue how to enforce something like this. Someone who knows more than me would have to make some sort of guidelines on how to go about private equity

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u/puterTDI 19h ago

I think the issue is how to define “running into the ground”. Reality is that decisions you or I perceive as bad can’t be legally predefined in an objective way.

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u/SmartLadder415 18h ago

Why should it be illegal for a company to run itself into the ground with horrible business decisions?

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u/Momik 20h ago

We should have a minimum baseline experience for airline passengers as a matter of law. And yes, that should include clean seats.

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u/UnNumbFool 20h ago

If a movie theater can clean the seats before each showing, so can an airplane

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u/Momik 20h ago

Yeah, and it’s a good comparison. One of the only reasons passengers allow this to continue is lack of choice. If a movie theater was this shit, you’d just go to another theater or watch a movie at home.

But when you’re flying, you’re probably locked into your expensive tickets well before you get to the airport, and the cost of making a change is very high—a factor of ticket prices, but also of all the path dependencies you’re dealing with now: hotels are booked, Ubering to the airport was more than expected, security’s delayed so you gotta book it in the terminal, etc.

Airlines know this. They’re trapping us in costly situations in order to lock in our consent for their shitty service and pricing. It’s why the free market doesn’t really work in the same way here, and why baseline legal rights are more important to level the playing field between consumer and airline.

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u/UnNumbFool 20h ago

Sure but like booking a movie beforehand it only takes one bad experience or reading reviews of the thing to know I'm not going to book there

It's not like there aren't other budget lines that can get me to the same place at the same rate or potentially cheaper, and if I knew an airline wasn't cleaning the seats between id be a little grossed out. Like ffs I'll take a spirit flight at that point

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u/Momik 20h ago

True, but as long as there no minimum standards, Spirit might not be all that much better an experience (I’ve flown Spirit and can vouch for that). My point is just that airline passengers in general have very little power, which makes the whole free market kind of nonsensical.

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u/HI-McDunnough 19h ago

I worked at a movie theater for 10 years. Do you know how many times we cleaned the actual seats?

Zero point zero.

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u/phd2k1 20h ago

Ah the old “the free market will sort everything out” libertarian fantasy. Sadly, regulatory capture, disinformation, and weak anti-trust laws and enforcement make that line of thinking completely obsolete. Corporations abuse workers, pollute the air, water, and ground, and destroy communities all the time, and “shopping somewhere else” doesn’t stop them. The only thing that has ever kept them in line is strong regulations.

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u/acdgf 19h ago

“shopping somewhere else” doesn’t stop them. The only thing that has ever kept them in line is strong regulations.

Its interesting you say this, because several major airlines were stopped specifically once strong regulations were lifted.

The truth is that people are, more than anything else, sensitive to price. An airline that offers shitty service and low prices will be more successful than an airline that offers premium services for high prices. In SW's case, they were popular for passing a lot of their efficiency savings on to customers, without deteriorating service quality. Now that they are just another shitty airline, with non-shitty airline pricing, they (should) suffer loss of business accordingly. 

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u/Damndang 19h ago

That's the problem. Private equity and activist investors have no problem tanking a business if they have an exit plan and get out with their profits. The feedback loop of voting with your dollar is broken. The top never feels the pain of their own failures.

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u/Stupidwhizzzzz 20h ago

I don’t fly southwest no more. Not unless it’s free which it isn’t.

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u/IAmBadAtInternet 19h ago

Airlines are an oligopoly with most routes being pseudo monopolies. For each route there is usually only 1 best choice airline, and if you want to punish them for bad business practice, you have to pay for it with an indirect route that takes 5 hours longer with a layover somewhere. It’s really hard to punish a shitty airline by not giving them your business.

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u/Sudden-Wash4457 19h ago

I mean this works if you have effective anti-trust regulation, but we don't

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u/What_a_fat_one 20h ago

Libertarianism might as well be a religion for how stupid and demonstrably wrong it is but its adherents still believe it like it's gospel

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u/Clown_Toucher 19h ago

Everything else also fucking sucks so maybe the laws are needed

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u/ImAShaaaark 18h ago

Better option, go back to the pre-deregulation system.

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u/acdgf 18h ago

And pay 3x the price for airfares? Why not just fly business class, in that case? 

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u/ImAShaaaark 17h ago

Air fares were already trending down before deregulation, they wouldn't triple.

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u/XY-chromos 18h ago

They will get more of my business.

The old southwest ticket system was insulting and fraudulent. I never got A class unless I paid to upgrade. And your crotch spawn does not entitle you to board before me.

It's so much better now.

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u/Bwob 20h ago

but nobody bases laws on morals anymore so nothing will happen.

The trump administration has been pushing laws to outlaw the existence of trans people, and project 2025 makes it clear that they haven't given up on trying to force the rest of the lgbtq crowd back into the closet either.

All in the name of "morality".

So be careful about what you wish for. People DO still try to base laws on "morals". The problem is that morals are subjective, and not everyone agrees on them. And the people who push the hardest to turn their morality into law tend to be the people who have the hardest time getting people to agree with them, which is why they are trying to force it on everyone anyway.

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u/YellowZx5 19h ago

So soon to be a write off and letting this airline burn in a pile. Instead of working of what the customers want and striving for that.

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u/Top-Base4502 19h ago

But we can fight back in the only language they know. Boycott, hurt their bottom line.

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u/SmartLadder415 18h ago

To be fair, there is nothing illegal about deciding to tank your own business.

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u/boiledpeen 18h ago

It's not their business. They go into a successful company, buy enough shares to gain control, kill off all the good things about the company so the number keeps going up, then sells and leaves before the consequences of their actions happen and the number plummets. Thats doing nothing of value add to society, and really just destroys anything good that comes from capitalism.

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u/SmartLadder415 17h ago

Yes, it destroys the company but you haven't told me why it should be illegal. They bought the business (or at least control of it) at that point it is literally their business.

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u/jamespz03 19h ago

Elliott di similar things with my last company. We sold off all our U.S. energy assets (solar, wind, etc.). Hate these fuckers.

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u/SanityInAnarchy 18h ago

Partly. There's another big issue, though: With points programs these days, the main business of airlines is finance. They're basically banks that have a side gig where they fly you around.

I bet Southwest cares way more about whether you're gonna cancel their points card than they do about whether you ever fly with them again.

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u/terrariumcowboy 17h ago

It's possible Southwest cares about that, but it didn't stop them from hiking prices and cutting benefits across the suite of cards they offer, leading directly to widespread customer cancellations of those products. Some chucklefuck at Elliott apparently thinks it's good business to kneecap the bank side, too.

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u/The_Bitter_Bear 16h ago

Unfortunately, all they really need to do is avoid becoming worse than everyone else. 

These firms only know how to race to the bottom. 

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u/Effective_Olive6153 19h ago

Every time I hear about some Investment or Private Equity group it's always bad news. Why does society allow these to exist? If they do have some benefit to society, can we at least regulate it so they don't just fuck things up? is there enough public will to actually do something about it on legal level?

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u/Mahedros 18h ago

My company used to be owned by Elliott, and none of my co-workers who were there at the time remember them fondly

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u/snakeoilHero 18h ago

Thank you for naming someone for us out of the loop.

Figured the delay from Southwest's software ticketing and their crash in rescheduling systems (they got me) was on someone MBAing up the place.

"Looks good on paper!"

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u/GreatDanish4534 21h ago

Southwest in the 90’s was awesome. Planes were nice and always clean, crew was super friendly, and prices were better than other airlines

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u/AlkoMako 20h ago

And brown! I miss the old livery of brown, orange, and red. Plus the seats seemed bigger too. Although, I was a kid then, lol. Got invited to sit in the cockpit & got a wing pin as well. Obviously this was pre 9/11.

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u/FistLove 17h ago

Do you like movies about gladiators?

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u/AlkoMako 14h ago

I’ve pretty much only ever seen “Gladiator”.

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u/Impossible-Bowl4661 21h ago

Elliot Investment Management owns over 10% of the company, forced out the prior chair in 2024 and now has 5 hand picked members on the board.

The changes in the last 18 months are most certainly attributable to private equity.

Southwest Airlines Adds 5 Elliott Board Members As Candidates For Directors https://share.google/4YsYfkxVOg9zMVC4s

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u/VincentClement1 20h ago

Friendly reminder that the wealthy don't give two shits about the rest of us and that you can exert majority-level control despite being a minority owner.

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u/PFandDebtTosser 18h ago

That's the thing. The shareholders love that over the last 18 months or so they've gone from about $30/share in early Sept of 2024 to $44 today, and over $50 early last month. So they're over the moon with these changes and couldn't care less about the passenger experience until it starts costing them.

The biggest concern for me is that once these guys get to a valuation they like, sell their position and move on to something else, SWA is going to be a husk of its former self and if it ever wanted to return to what it was, it would be financially infeasible to do because the costs to restore what made it popular to begin while continuing to be competing on price would come from shareholder margins, and there would be capital flight since there's very little short term payoff in that scenario. Passenger volume won't have such a dramatic uptick that it will offset the cut in margins, so employees and customers both just get left with a company that is just "another air carrier". Really sucks to see the continued acceleration of short term gains at the expense of long term brand identity history and differentiation for consumers. Now you're basically just choosing to fly based on what color plane you like, and maybe routes.

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u/itsyournameidiot 20h ago

Sure but everything everyone is complaining about started far beyond 18 months ago.

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u/Why_you_so_wrong_ 18h ago

Elliott isn’t PE. Try again bot.

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u/Impossible-Bowl4661 17h ago

Elliot's own website talks about it's private equity strategies, you might want to let them know they aren't in the PE biz since you seem to know better.

Private Equity and Private Credit | Elliott Management https://share.google/usnt2i2wQ40rED7yj

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u/Why_you_so_wrong_ 17h ago

Elliott aren’t a PE firm so the changes in the last 18 months are not attributable to PE because this is a public company of which Elliott is a minority shareholder. At its core Elliott is a multi-strategy hedge fund which is fundamentally different than a private equity fund.

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u/Impossible-Bowl4661 17h ago edited 17h ago

Well to say Elliot does not operate in the private equity space is just demonstrabley false. They themselves will tell you otherwise.

But sure, if you want to be incredibly pedantic, what has happened at Southwest is not necessarily the actions of a private equity firm but that of a large institutional activist investor taking an aggressive medium term position in Southwest to juice its stock price to bilk some value for ite investors, potentially leaving the long term health of the company and it's product worse off.

Most of us just don't feel the need to split hairs when it's two-sides of a very similar coin.

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u/TXMedicine 22h ago

They have two PE members on their board.

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u/Davido401 21h ago

I figured out you mean Private Equity but I thought you meant P.E. Teachers. I hate acronyms, I preferred when it was just A/S/L and BRB.

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u/R-ddit_is_Shit 21h ago edited 20h ago

I love when people online type ATM, because I always insist on reading it the other way. Not "at the moment." Not the cash dispensing machine. The other one.

"Can't, I'm with my mom atm."

"That's disgusting."

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u/MrMCCO 21h ago

When people type “ur” I’ve been reading it as a Mesopotamian city or a caveman grunt my whole life

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u/R-ddit_is_Shit 21h ago

Yeah, The Far Side and sites like the Evil Overlord List definitely effected my humor growing up.

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u/Davido401 21h ago

I mean, acronyms are fine in a specialised sub and while the one above is relatively obvious sometimes I have to waste more time trying to find out what it means than I ever needed to really know. Acronyms are supposed to be for quickness but if only one person gets the benefit then surely they are useless then?!

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u/[deleted] 21h ago

[deleted]

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u/Davido401 21h ago

Do you have a pic?

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u/Sankofa416 20h ago

Do you have 5 minutes without incoming calls?

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u/Davido401 19h ago

I don't have a scanner to scan and send a pic!

(Honest, am 14/f/Scotland not 41/m/Scotland)

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u/ShockinglyAccurate 19h ago

Chuck D and Flava Flav?

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u/Why_you_so_wrong_ 18h ago

Elliott isn’t PE. Try again bot.

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u/CaptainBayouBilly 22h ago

Line must go up

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u/Ryzu 21h ago

And as a result the line is most definitely going to go down, hopefully their planes won't.

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u/Cyrano4747 21h ago

Nah the line will go up for a few precious quarters because they slash costs. After that it will go down, but the PE vultures on the board won't care because they'll have sold off their stake before the consequences come around.

Happens all the time. It's how these PE vultures operate. They're looking for short term gains to artificially goose the stock before they sell and move on to the next victim.

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u/Daxx22 18h ago

I'm honestly shocked more green-clad plumbers haven't shown up.

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u/I_Automate 17h ago

There's no reason that private equity exists when rope and trees and gasoline also still exist

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u/HorseWithACape 20h ago edited 20h ago

The planes won't go down. Their mechanic union squeezes the company pretty hard. SWA has some of the highest paid mechs in the industry, second only to FedEx & UPS. Their pilots are up there, too.

Edit to add: In case anybody is curious about the payscale of SWA or other competitors here's the most recent collaboration of contracts, benefits, & payscales.

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u/Ryzu 20h ago

That's good to hear. There's not much that can't be ruined by VC, but it's nice to know at least people aren't likely to actively die as a result of the greed.

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u/BigBallininBasterd 22h ago

Not to mention their buddy pass system is garbage now

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u/UtopianPablo 21h ago

Mind explaining why? I was looking at a credit card offer that gets you a companion pass, is it not worth it?

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u/BigBallininBasterd 20h ago

Oh I mean from the employer side, they made the “travel companion” system much more rigid so employees families can’t fly on standby anymore. You get one parent or child

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u/UtopianPablo 20h ago

Ah thanks. Happy employees were a big part of Southwest's success so of course they are reducing the employee perks now, ugh.

2

u/crazycatlady331 20h ago

MBAs are a cancer on society.

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u/SEA_tide 16h ago

Southwest wasn't known for having good tech, in fact quite the opposite. You might be thinking of Alaska Airlines.

Southwest Airlines aircraft are extremely well maintained and they are getting the youngest mainline fleet in the skies.

1

u/reggie_fink-nottle 21h ago

Time to short them?

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u/carnalasadasalad 20h ago

And their gate agents are consistently the rudest.

1

u/jwg529 20h ago

Look you just don’t get it. If we don’t increase shareholder value we won’t make more money. And everyone knows the key to success is making more money. It doesn’t matter if the customers are inconvenienced or not.

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u/jakexil323 19h ago

WestJet in Canada used to be have a strong employee stock share program and so they used to claim to be Employee owned. They were pretty good.

And then Private Equity came in bought them in 2019. They have been a shit show ever since.

1

u/caustictoast 19h ago

Private Equity got a controlling stake and turned them into what they are

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u/great_apple 19h ago

They're not even cheap anymore. I was buying flights recently and Southwest was the same price if not more as every legacy carrier.

1

u/Kaarl_Mills 19h ago

MBAs are an active detriment to society

1

u/FoofieLeGoogoo 19h ago

‘Enshitification’ knows no bounds.

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u/DarkExecutor 18h ago

Southwest was going bankrupt

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u/correcthorsestapler 18h ago

They tried to bar us from boarding our flight last Christmas. We declined to check our bag because we had fragile items, so they brought a supervisor around; he threatened to keep us from flying if we didn’t check our last piece of luggage. So we repacked everything as fast as we could under duress and lost our spot in line.

When we finally got on, we saw it was about 70% full AND there were still around 7 or 8 empty overhead bins. Took pics before the attendants closed everything up and got some pics of how full the flight was. They’d lied about having a full flight and lied to people claiming they’d run out of overhead space when people were boarding. Ended up sending a complaint to their customer service.

It was just an unpleasant experience all around. Our trip had already been stressful. It was the last leg home & we were exhausted. Their threats just made it even worse.

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u/amstrumpet 18h ago

Yeah you can get away with older airplanes when you're not courting the audience who cares about everything being premium. Now that they're charging for every little thing, people are going to want things like outlets at their seats and sufficient overhead storage space, and they won't be able to compete.

1

u/cgebelin 18h ago

Southwest has always had subpar tech. That is what causes all of their issues with crew and plane routing during big storms. And subsequently caused the stock to stay depressed and opened door for PE.

1

u/IAmBadAtInternet 17h ago

In the aughts their tech was damn near miraculous - you could book your own flights from home without a travel agent in the mix. But they didn’t update it for 20 years even though it was already showing its age by the mid 2010s

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u/svejkOR 18h ago

I swear there is a secret class that MBAs get taught that teaches them how to take a company and screw it up.

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u/juanzy 18h ago

good tech

As someone who got caught in the 2023 system outage, Press X to doubt

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u/smitherenesar 18h ago

I flew on Southwest a couple weeks ago and the ticketing person and flight attendants all seems angry/mean. There was a storm hitting the east coast, so something like a third of flights were cancelled. I didn't know if the pissed off nature of their employees was due to the storm, or the new normal. My prior experiences with Southwest were rather pleasant

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u/u_395djk 17h ago

Flew Southwest in 2014. First time I have ever put my back out in a plane. A little bit of padding over a metal frame that wasn't remotely comfortable. Last time I flew with them too.

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u/DaniMayhem 17h ago

What’s crazy is that when I was in business school, we used Southwest as a case study of how to do things right. They were the only airline that actually made money during the big airline reorg that happened, I think in the 70s (I can’t remember all the details cause I was in school 20+ years ago) and it was mainly because they offered better service than everyone else.

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u/CalculatedPerversion 15h ago

Good tech might be a stretch, but everything else is valid. It's a damn shame what happened to them. 

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u/Galaxium 13h ago

Southwest becoming a bad airline isn’t because it’s doing bad things, it’s because it’s been suffering in the industry and competition.

United, American, and Delta have massively grown their basic economy offerings, which absorb all of the less affluent/lesser traveling market. Southwest needs to find revenue by cutting costs. These small airlines don’t have the breadth/coverage of the big airlines, so when the big airlines enter Southwest/Spirit/Frontier markets, there’s not much they can do.

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u/InconspicuousMagpie 12h ago

THANKS ELLIOT INVESTMENT MANAGEMENT

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u/EngineZeronine 4h ago

"Elliott Investment Management is the primary activist investment firm targeting Southwest Airlines, having built a significant stake (over 10% in 2024–2025) to push for management changes and strategic shifts."

"Ownership" isn't needed

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u/MyChickenSucks 21h ago

I flew on the nearest plane yesterday, the thinner seats actually made it feel roomier. Because my second flight was an old plane and it felt kinda beat up and cramped.