Southwest option to board first

I got a Southwest Rapid Rewards card early in college (or late in high school, at this point, I can’t remember). In retrospect, this was a good decision. Finding good, affordable flights back and forth between Colorado and California during college was easy. Now that I’ve been out of school for 7 years, I’m amassed hundreds of thousands of points.

This is great, but I’m starting to get to a point in life where I don’t want to fight someone for a window seat on a plane. Yes, Southwest is moving to assigned seating, but I foresee a lot of friction between new customers who want this and holdovers from the current way of booking and selecting seats (which is chaotic).

This got me thinking about another monetization angle for Southwest. I got a push notification prompting me to upgrade our seating to A1-A15 last night (to be clear, this means priority boarding, but does not assign a seat).

What if, instead of giving you better access, they rolled out the red carpet and made sure you were the first person to board? you could charge a premium for this, but unfortunately, there’s only one available per flight.

I don’t see this getting shipped, but it’s fun to imagine a world where it does.

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