Southwest shows off customizations for new Recaro seats

Earlier this year Southwest Airlines made a major move, announcing it would shift to Recaro as its seat supplier. Last week at Aircraft Interiors Expo 2024 in Hamburg the companies unveiled the actual seats – not just renderings, highlighting some customizations on the Recaro R2 (formerly BL3710) that will make the seats truly unique to Southwest.

It is truly a seat that is the voice of the customer.

– Brian Tierney, Southwest VP Customer Experience

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Having spent two years in the selection process, Southwest relied heavily on data when down selecting from eleven potential vendors to one winner. That included more than 5,000 different people trying the seats, along with frequent design tweaks from its partner Tangerine.

The company focused three components of the seat – neck, back, and bottom – to ensure comfort throughout. Each was evaluated separately, with significant feedback from customer surveys and the maintenance team to evaluate the options available.

Read more: Southwest shifts seating supplier in interiors revamp

Southwest’s VP Customer Experience Brian Tierney was clear that the company was rigorous in that testing, including customers of “all shapes and sizes, all types of backgrounds, leisure and business travelers.” Those tests delivered significant volumes of data, and at least three key custom features for the offering:

• The headrest offers multiple adjustments, but it is not Recaro’s unique six-way headrest. Tierney was especially keen on the new design, noting that he rarely is comfortable on airplanes, but the new headrest works well.
• While Recaro tends to reliver the R2 with a shorter arm rest to save on weight, Southwest chose to keep a longer design, similar to older seat models. The company will still keep the armrest width down, however, a move Tierney describes as providing both comfort in terms of personal space, while also delivering increased support for travelers.
• The seat cushion went through at least ten different iterations, tweaking the cushion density and padding layout to deliver optimal comfort for passengers.
• The tray table has two cup insets, making it convenient for left or right-handed passengers. Or for parents sharing a tray with their kids.

Of course, none of this guarantees that everyone will like the seat. But Tierney is confident the in-depth testing and data-driven selection process will yield a pop in passenger satisfaction scores when the seats take flight. The company currently expects that to happen early in 2025, though it depends on Boeing‘s production schedule.

Read more: Southwest searching for new seats

One challenge for the company is that the new seats are only being installed on new aircraft deliveries; they will not be retrofit on existing planes. Travelers won’t be able to pick their travel experience. How that impacts NPS scoring remains to be seen, but the carrier did not have a good answer as to how it would address that challenge.

The potential shift of Southwest’s seating supplier was first tipped by PaxEx.Aero in September 2022.

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Southwest’s premium cabin potential

As for the potential to add premium seating on board, reported heavily earlier this year, Tierney deflected. Yes, Southwest is looking at options. But it is always doing that, he explained.

And while this is a more in depth look, those are also a regular occurrence for the company:

I know that there was a press release that says we’re evaluating our seating. This will be at least the third time in my 20 years that we’ve done that… We look at that every three to five years. We’ll see what the customer wants, see how that mixes with our model and we’ll go from there. But we take pride in having a strong voice of the customer.

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