The long title for this blog could be "Why I Fly Delta when I can and avoid Southwest."
A bunch of years ago (don't ask) I was trying to fly home for Christmas vacation. A bunch of us got snowed in at Ft Wayne (IN) airport. Not a great place (though I am sure it is better now) to spend the night. We slept on seating that was not meant for sleeping and generally just tried to keep warm. There was no way we could go anywhere. It was that sort of snow storm.
The next morning the skies were blue and the runways were clear. Time to fly? Well, not exactly. The airline we had tickets on said they could not get a plane in to take us out for another day. Maybe two. Any of you who are or who ever have been in college know that Christmas break is too short as it is. So we walked over to the other airline (yeah, at that time there were only two at this airport) and explained our situation. The other airline was Delta.

Long story short, Delta took our tickets from the other airline, flew us to a larger airport and from their found us all seats on flights home. All of us. At the height of the holiday travel period. Some of us had to fly FIrst Class but we could life with that. That sort of service is why I flew Delta for years. I should tell you that I have more stories of great customer service at Delta. They have some of the best people in the world as far as I am concerned. And so I fly with them when ever I can.

Now the other side. I used to fly Southwest Airlines a lot. Their prices are great. But there is one thing that they do that really bothers me. Seating is first come first served. Now that is not a bad thing by itself. I get to the airport early, stand in line and get a good seat. The problem comes when I have to make a connecting flight. I almost never get a good seat then because I can’t possibly get there early enough. One day I called to complain about this. I suggested that they could easily assign good group numbers to people who were connecting. The computers could do this when they checked in. This would make their lives easier and make them happier fliers. The short answer that ended the conversation for me was “Southwest isn’t for everyone.” Darn right. It is apparently not for me. They could have said “that’s an interesting idea. We’ll look into it.” Almost anything other then a pure write off would have made me happy. So now I almost never fly Southwest. Big deal I guess. I only fly 75,000 to 100,000 miles a year. And I’m one guy.

But Delta makes me feel like they want my business and Southwest doesn’t.