Things in the Sky

I know I’m a bit late to the game on this topic, but I wanted to share a couple of thoughts of last week’s fee announcement from Southwest. If you haven’t heard already, the airline will be charging $75 for pets to fly onboard (they weren’t allowed in the past), is increasing the fee for the third bag from $25 to $50, and adding a service charge of $25 each way for unaccompanied minors. To be honest, when looking at the wonderful FareCompare fees chart, these new fees seem pretty reasonable.

Anyway, a few thoughts I had:

First, Southwest used one of my least-favorite PR moves with this one. The press release for these changes was entitled “Southwest Airlines Welcomes Fluffy and Fido Onboard.” Where’s the part about bags and unaccompanied minors? (Edit: Southwest’s Paula Berg does point out that it was mentioned in the subtitle of the news release.) At least the title of the company’s blog post on the subject, “Southwest Airlines Introduces New Pet Policy, Other Changes,” implies that something else is being announced as well. I know that trying to make positive headlines is standard operating procedure for basically any company in any industry, but putting in other information just irks me sometimes.

Second, why mention that the unaccompanied minor and third bag fee changes affect a very small amount of passengers? I guess Southwest wants to say they’re not screwing over too many people with fees, but I think such a statement could backfire, at least maybe from a shareholder perspective. Someone might ask “is something that affects a small number of passengers really help revenues?” I know this is a minor thing, but I thought of it nontheless.

Third, and most importantly, I think, what does this do to Southwest’s “No Hidden Fees” image that it has worked so hard to protect? Well, if we look at one of Southwest’s ads from last year (thanks to Beckles on FlyerTalk for that), you can see that none of the recent changes affect those. But, see the URL on that ad? Well, southwest.com/nofees redirects to southwest.com/nohiddenfees, which now redirects to the homepage. Thanks to Google’s cache, we can see that Southwest even used the FareCompare chart, but now its gone. (Thanks to ftnoob.) Ftnoob alos pointed out on FlyerTalk, that while Southwest has mentioned its lack of hidden fees in press releases, it isn’t anymore.

Could this mean that more changes could be on the way? Maybe, but who knows, the changes could just be part of Southwest’s new ad campaign. (I saw some examples in PVD and FLL on Saturday and liked them.) Anyway, it will be interesting to see what happen.