Embattled Southwest Airlines held its investors day on September 26, and one of the announcements made is that Southwest is increasing Hawai’i service in 2025. Beyond that, though, there wasn’t a whole lot of interesting announcements made.
I’ve been meaning to publish a post of Elliott’s latest shenanigans, but other news has been taken priority over that piece, and I’ve been putting it off for almost two weeks now. While I’ll get around to it next week, I want to talk about the upcoming changes Southwest’s leadership discussed the other day, including how Southwest is increasing Hawai’i service in 2025. That all said, given the battle the airline is currently locked into, there’s no guarantee their plans will be implemented as stated. We’ll just have to see what Elliott does next, as I’m sure they aren’t happy.
Southwest is Increasing Hawai’i Service in 2025
Several months ago, I discussed Southwest’s first set of redeye flights. These flights are all East Coast – West Coast types, even though the carrier had stated that Hawai’i was one of its goals when it begins overnight service. Well, that time has come, and Southwest is increasing Hawai’i service in 2025 with overnight flights. These new options will become available at two West Coast gateways – Phoenix and Las Vegas.
Phoenix will see two redeye flights from the islands, one from Honolulu and the other from Lihue. The HNL-PHX flight departs Honolulu 9:05 pm HST and arrives in Phoenix at 6:05 am PT, while the OGG-PHX frequency departs Kahului at 8:30 pm HST and arrives at 5:20 am PT.
For Las Vegas, the new overnight flights will originate in Honolulu, Kahului, and Kona. The Honolulu flight departs at 9:00 pm HST and arrives 5:50 am PT, while Kahului flight departs at 8:25 pm HST and arrives at 5:00 am PT. The Kona flight departs at 8:30 pm HST and arrives at 5:10 am PT. It’s worth noting that these are not new flights, with the exception of the Honolulu one. Rather, existing flights are being rescheduled. The Honolulu one appears to be an additional third frequency.
By the way, these flights are already for sale and commence on April 8, 2025.
Global Airline Partnerships
One of Southwest’s greatest weaknesses is that it’s a lone wolf. Well, it seems the airline’s management is cognizant of this. That’s why, in addition to news that Southwest is increasing Hawai’i service in 2025, they’re also announcing their work to partner with international carriers. Which ones? Well, they’ve announced Iclandair as their initial partner through a gateway at Baltimore-Washington International Airport beginning in 2025 and will expand to additional gateways throughout the year. An additional partner will also be announced sometime in the later half of the year.
Premium Seating
Airline leaders said we’d learn more about this intriguing new offering at their investors day, and they indeed provided some new details. For one, as everyone theorized, the premium seating will be extra space seating. Specifically, these seats will offer five additional inches of pitch, meaning they’ll be 37 to 38 inches, which is similar to Alaska Air’s Premium Class. Moreover, they say that roughly a third of seats will be converted to this new Premium Class. Being that Southwest’s Boeing 737 MAX 8s have 175 seats, which means there will be roughly nine and 10 rows of these seats on these aircraft. Allegedly, there will be no impact to all other seats.
Boarding
While Southwest will have assigned seating, boarding order will likely change a bit. While details remain limited, what we do know is that the boarding groups and numbers will remain, and that elites and premium seating passengers will board first.
Assigned Seating
Speaking of assigned seating, Southwest will begin selling assigned seating in 2025 for flights in the first half of 2026.
Checked Bags
Southwest’s management says that they remain committed to offering two free checked bags for each and every passenger. They say that “any change in the current policy that provides every Customer two free checked bags1 would drive down demand and far outweigh any revenue gains created by imposing and collecting bag fees.”
Fleet
Southwest has too many airplanes, and too many large ones. There isn’t much they can do about the lack of Boeing 737 MAX 7s. However, word has it that they’re going to divest their fleet of Boeing 737-800s.
Southwest is Increasing Hawai’i Service in 2025, Final Thoughts
There are more tidbits in Southwest’s press release, but I’ve covered what I think are the major points above. If you want to learn more about the fine details, you can check them out at Southwest’s investor relations page. At any rate, I do hope their expanding Hawai’i strategy helps them along in the islands. Preserving this level of competition is important, in my opinion. But that may only happen if management can hold of the vulture that are Elliott.
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