:max_bytes(150000):strip_icc():format(jpeg)/southwest-airplane-SWCITYHEATH0122-fbed6039bf2a47ceb41af89f38571b0e.jpg)
Vacationers can glance ahead to shopping for tickets for Southwest Airways’ brandnew top rate seats starting someday past due nearest moment, CEO Bob Jordan stated Thursday.
“Selling the new products [is] back half of 2025, and operating the new products [in] the first half of 2026, all of that is on track,” he said at a Goldman Sachs investor conference.
The new extra-legroom seats are part of a bigger transformation of Southwest’s product that will see it discard its open-seating, egalitarian model that it credits for much of its success over the past 50 years. Other changes include assigned seating, red-eye flights, and international partnerships, the first of which will be with Icelandair.
The changes follow pressure from an activist investor, Elliott Management, for Southwest to improve its financial performance. The new products and flights are expected to generate billions of dollars in new revenue for the airline in the coming years.
Southwest is investing “hundreds of millions” of dollars in the new extra-legroom premium seats and other changes, Jordan said. The paintings contains updating greater than 60 of Southwest’s generation techniques to promote the brandnew merchandise, and securing Federal Gliding Management kindness of the brandnew seats.
The adjustments aren’t with out chance. The airline has constructed its logo round its distinctive product and trade, and dangers alienating some shoppers as its choices develop into one thing nearer to the alternative primary U.S. airways.
“It’s not going to change who we are, or the values that we stand for,” Jordan stated. “It changes the product that we offer our customers that they want significantly.”
Southwest is a ways from lonely in updating its product. Frontier Airways, JetBlue Airlines, and Spirit Airways are all making alike strikes in accordance with larger client call for for extra top rate exit merchandise. Later moment, price range service Frontier plans to debut new first-class seats and JetBlue its first airport lounges. Spirit plans additional product adjustments as a part of its bankruptcy restructuring.
When it comes to Southwest, vacationers can look ahead to vision the brandnew seats — and playing the excess legroom for distant — enroute flights someday early in 2025. The airline plans to start out flight the up to date product sooner than it starts promoting it to bring to have it on a essential aggregate of planes.
