Kari McCaw was flying with co-workers to attend a conference in Las Vegas last month when Southwest Airlines employees stopped her at the ticket counter. The agents’ message was clear — either buy a second seat for herself or don’t fly.
McCaw is not alone in her experience. In January, Southwest’s popular “customer of size” policy changed, and flyers have taken to social media to share their frustrations. Flyers report that customer service agents have singled them out for their appearance and forced them to buy another seat to be accommodated, something they’ve never needed to do before. SFGATE identified nearly a dozen viral videos from different passengers and spoke to several customers who described similar negative experiences. Many of them say they won’t be flying Southwest again.
McCaw first shared her story about flying out of Connecticut’s Bradley International Airport on March 10 in a viral video. She said she felt profiled at the gate because of her size, despite never having to purchase two seats before.
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Kennedy Woodard-Jones checked in for her flight home from a work trip 24 hours in advance earlier this month. Her emailed reminder from American Airlines referenced her “flight to Chicago O’Hare,” for which she had chosen a seat. She went through the Transportation Security Administration checkpoint as usual.
Woodard-Jones, an engineer, lined up at the gate in South Bend, Indiana, and that’s when things got confusing. A bus sat outside, with workers loading bags underneath. She figured the bus would take them to the plane. But the American Airlines-branded motor coach rolled down the tarmac and off airport property.
“It wasn’t until we were on the highway that I realized this is my ride to O’Hare,” said Woodard-Jones, 27. “There’s no plane. It took me a second for it to really lock in that this is not a plane ride.”
Woodard-Jones had found herself traveling via a fairly recent development in regional transportation. The Landline Company, founded in 2018, operates routes via bus for three airlines from small communities to larger hubs that might have once been served with the type of small planes that have fallen out of use.
American said the vast majority of Landline service customers are using it for connecting flights. The buses make Philadelphia connections to and from five smaller airports in Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware and, as of October, Chicago O’Hare connections to and from Rockford, Illinois, and South Bend. No routes are served by both bus and American Airlines planes, the airline said.