What Happened to Southwest Airlines? A Deep Dive Into Its Decline – Fodor’s Travel
Former Southwest employee Scott Laird did his own deep dive into the decline of Southwest for his role writing for Fodor’s, and I chimed in with some of my thoughts as well.
Southwest Will Begin Charging for Checked Bags, Ending a Popular Policy – The New York Times
In its article on Southwest’s policy changes, The New York Times quoted this website. That would certainly explain the avalanche of comments on Tuesday’s post. Welcome, new readers!
Florida Tonight: Episode 21 – Fox 13 Tampa Bay
I didn’t know anything about this new show, but I assumed it would just be about Florida Man or alligators… but oddly enough there were a lot of stories about horses on this episode. But before the horses, I did lead it off with a short interview talking about Southwest. Please enjoy the very end where I try to correct the anchor for saying that Southwest has a lot of old airplanes and not all have wifi… but I get cut off as the segment finishes.
Southwest Airlines ends free baggage policy and bets on profits starting in May – Mix Vale
Cranky goes global! They actually just commented about what I said on the blog, so I don’t know anything about this outlet, but here’s a Brazilian write-up.
If you weren’t at the 2025 Cranky Network Awards presented by Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport, you missed a great time. As promised, we will have two wrap-up videos for you. The first one is ready, and it’s a short 2m41s look at the fun.
Stay tuned for the longer video which will have winners and more.
The Air Show is back again, and this time it’s just me and Brian since Jon is on the road. You might think that we’d tackle Southwest this week… and we did, sort of. But that was only for the back half. Up front was a discussion about dropping demand and what we learned listening to the JP Morgan Industrials Conference.
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4 comments on “Cranky on the Web: So Much Southwest + Demand is Dropping + CNA Wrap Video”
Enjoyed the Air Show episode.
Was there any acknowledgement by airline brass that some of the weakening of demand is due to canceled travel from abroad?
According to
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/03/16/international-tourism-travel-trump-canada/
“… air travel from the United States was down 13 percent compared with a year earlier, according to government figures from Statistics Canada.?Altogether, Tourism Economics expects a 15 percent decline in travel from Canada this year, translating to $3.3 billion in lost spending.”
And that is just Canada.
Oliver – I haven’t seen US airlines saying much about it yet. They tend to have much greater point of sale in the US which is not going to take nearly as much of a hit. (It’s not good anywhere, but demand from abroad seems far worse.) The Canadian airlines are slashing flights through summer at this point. I know many haven’t talked about there being much trouble with long-haul yet, but it is absolutely coming unless something drastically changes in the US administration. I don’t expect that to happen.
I know you can’t really help this, but that was a very white, male event…
CLT Flyer – You aren’t kidding… welcome to the world of network planning. It wasn’t entirely male and white, but that is certainly the overwhelming predominance.