Southwest Airlines is going to start confiscating passenger bags at the gate on almost every flight once they begin charging for checked bags in two months.
More people check bags today on Southwest than any other airline in the world, because they don’t charge extra. When that stops, the airline estimates that their checked baggage volume may drop 30%. And most of those bags are going to try to squeeze in to passenger cabins. There’s just not enough room. And that’s going to be a problem for Southwest Airlines on-time reliability, and it’s going to be a huge problem for customer experience.
Justin Jones, Executive Vice President of Operations at Southwest Airlines appeared on this week’s episode of Airlines Confidential and he answered candidly and earnestly about the operational challenges involved in some of the changes that Southwest will be making to its business model as it becomes ‘just like every other airline but less than’ with assigned seating, basic economy, checked bag fees and a devalued frequent flyer program.
There were a lot of smiles over ‘how is this going to work’ when Southwest Airlines starts charging for checked bags, and there’s an influx of bags into the cabin.
- They are going to be “extremely hesitant to do heavily policing on bag size” like at “some other airlines.” And he acknowledges that means even more gate checking of bags because those oversized bags take up more room in the bins, meaning room for fewer total bags.
- “Houston gates still have an old cable system” for gate checking bags, that can handle up to 10 bags at a time and they’re “going to have to replace that” just because they know the gate checking of bags is going to go up so much. However, he says, “we did think through some of this ahead of time” so they’re going to be increasing capital spending to deal with the new policies.
Jones admits that he is “very concerned about the gate checked bags” taking time during the boarding process and slowing down the operation.
The airline is trying to reduce the amount of time planes are on the ground. They only make money when planes are in the air. But this is going to hurt on-time performance and their ability to schedule planes as efficiently as they do today.
Southwest doesn’t have as many oversized bins as other airlines (though he says 737-800 and MAX 8 planes should have bigger bins by the end of 2026). As passengers try to bring more bags on board to avoid the fees, boarding is going to take longer. Gate checking bags take longer still. And there’s going to be a worse customer experience with bags taken away from them.