Southwest is that rarest of airlines these days: The kind making money. This article mentions some of the reasons and I'll mention three more…
- They seem to go the right places at the right time. Well, at least they do for me. I fly Southwest about 80% of the time when I fly. I rarely find a case where another carrier has a flight leaving at a time that would be better for me. The only time that's happened in a while was my recent trip to and from Indianapolis. When I'd flown there in the past on business, I took Southwest because their flights left and arrived at times that would work for me. They've now discontinued those particular flights but as it turns out, and this is perhaps not a coincidence, Delta added flights at those exact same times.
- There's just a friendliness about Southwest. The people who work there seem happy to be working there…and not so beleaguered doing half a hundred things that they don't have time to answer a question.
- This is like the second one but not quite. When things go wrong, as happens with any airline, I've always found it easy to find an appropriate Southwest employee to assist me. I have a couple of horror stories about an airline that will remain nameless (it was United) that seemed to think, "Hey, we can save money by not having any employees who can help folks with problems."
So there's three reasons they're doing so well. A fourth might be that there's bucks to be made if when I fly anywhere, my suitcase isn't put on the same plane as me. I don't know how this can be so lucrative for them but it must be, given how often they do it.