Inside Southwest’s new cabin

It is just a mockup, a sampler of what is to come. But as part of its Investor Day event in Dallas last week Southwest Airlines put its new cabin on display for media and analysts alike.

The carrier brought in the newest seats from Recaro and pitched the cabin with the freshly revealed extra legroom layout. They showed off the updated color scheme and the seat customizations that will fly on board, including the seat cushioning, tray table, and headrest designs. It is still an economy class seat on an airplane; the geometry around that is relatively well set. But the carrier believes it is “truly a seat that is the voice of the customer.”

And one that will help the company boost its revenues significantly.

A combination of the lowest cost and the best revenue per square foot is going to win, and it’s going to produce industry winning margins. – Ryan Green, Southwest’s EVP Commercial Transformation

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Note: Southwest provided one-way airfare to offset the cost of attending the event; as always, opinions are my own.

More padding, more (or less) legroom

Southwest’s fleet today flies with 32″ pitch pretty much nose-to-tail. In the new cabin layout 30-40% the seats will shift to 34″ pitch while the remaining will drop to 31″. While the difference on board in noticeable, neither option was particularly knee-crushing to me.

The carrier has the advantage of having seen how every other airline approached selling seats over the past several decades, and will join many of them in putting a premium price on “preferred” seats towards the front of the cabin, even at just 31″ pitch. The first five rows will be extra legroom seats, as will five around the exit rows (though the B/C/D/F exit row seats on the –8/–800 will be normal, while A/F are ELR). In between those sections the 31″ pitched seats forward of the wings will cost extra for most passengers to book.

The seats will also include water bottle holders in the mesh netting at knee level. My slightly larger (700mL, insulated) bottle fit inside, but just barely. It also fits in the same spot on the currently flying Meridian seats, even without the dedicated space.

The company also confirmed that its lowest Wanna Get Away fare family will not include advance seat assignments; passengers who want to confirm their seat in advance will need to buy the WGA+ option. This was positioned as not taking anything away from the exist product. Chief Operating Officer Andrew Watterson explained, “We have a driver for buy-ups that is substantial and is not about scaring people away.”

The existing aircraft will see their existing seats rearranged into the new layout, not replaced with the new Recaro offering on board. That’s more a function of timing and supply chain flow than anything else. Indeed, one executive opined that some of the Meridian-equipped planes are getting up in age and could be in line for replacement, but Southwest was not convinced on the timing of new seats builds to be able to commit to a full swap.

The older seats will see new covers applied, however, bringing the light blue/dark blue headrest setup that identifies the extra legroom seats on board.

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What’s taking so long?

Frontier Airlines announced new seating and bundling options and rolled them out in a matter of weeks. Spirit Airlines did the same. For Southwest, however, the shift will take at least 17 months from the public announcement back in July (and even longer, if you consider the rumors floated about “premium” seating at the beginning of the year). During the Investor Day event executives pushed back on the impression that the effort would take too long to go live.

I think we’re moving very quickly. We studied this most of the last year. To move from an announcement in June to we will be ready in the second half of 2025 when you have 800 aircraft or retrofit and technology work to do, I think is moving very quickly. – CEO Bob Jordan

The carrier will use the existing seats, which helps speed the process, but the FAA must still approve the new cabin layout because the seat spacing will shift. Weight and balance calculations must also be updated. Neither Frontier nor Spirit had to contend with that factor. And Southwest does have to alter around 800 planes, far more than either of those carriers. Even at a pace of 50-100 per month (fewer during summer peak), that will take a year to roll through.

Read more: Southwest searching for new seats

So why not get a head start once a critical mass of planes is fitted? Green explained that Southwest did consider a staged rollout, either on a sub-fleet or on specific routes, but that idea was quickly dismissed as adding too much complexity with insufficient revenue upside. “If you picked a market and had connections in that city, some of the people would have be in an open seating world and some of the people would be in a assigned seating world,” he offered as just one example of such complexities.

Moreover, the benefits for Rapid Reward members would shift depending on which type of seating was offered. Family boarding and even accommodating Federal Air Marshalls will also be affected. Jordan expressed similar concerns, noting the company has “been wired for 53 years to do open seating, and it would be very difficult to do a part of the fleet… We’re going to do what it takes to de-risk this, to do it right for our customers.”

The arguably largest challenge for this transition, however, is on the IT side of the operation.

Indeed, Southwest believes that even if it wanted to roll out the program in a limited manner on a subset of planes or routes, it probably won’t have the IT fully in place until all the planes are converted anyways. Indeed, Jordan described the technology side of the shift as the “long pole” in the conversion process, expecting it to take roughly the same amount of time as the fleet conversion.

Read more: Southwest to assign seats, add extra legroom

Green called out more than 60 applications – from the customer-facing channels that will all need to have seat maps added to the reservations, flight planning, gate agent and myriad internal operations – that need to be updated. And, more importantly, tested. The company is building in significant testing time for this development noting that all of these systems are so intertwined.

Ultimately, Green concluded, “It just gets really complex, and there’s a lot of details. The idea that you could do it for just a certain market, or operate in kind of a mixed open seating and assigned seating impacts our ability to do this cleanly. We want customers to understand this. We want them to embrace it. We want to execute it really, really well.”

In terms of hitting the timeline, Green noted that the company will be performing the aircraft reconfigurations both internally and with outside MRO partners. That capacity has been secured, he says, ensuring that the retrofits will happen on time.

The company also notes that, given the longer conversion timeline, there’s a strong chance that passengers will get to experience the new layout before they have to pay for the better seats. That could help drive demand once the new policies take effect. Or even boost early boarding buy-ups at the gate from travelers who can identify a converted plane before boarding.