Southworst officially shits the bed — personal vacation experience, non-Zionist version

For “Southworst,” we’re talking about the legacy airline (you are) officially called Southwest, and for non-Zionist version, we’re riffing on Paul Singer, creator of Elliott Investment Management, to whom the then-current Southworst board and top brass repeatedly and incrementally caved in to in 2024-25, and who is himself indeed an ardent Zionist.

(On that? Washington Report on Middle East Affairs wrote back in 2019 about Singer’s efforts to fund growth in Israel’s high-tech industry. In other words, spyware like Pegasus may be in part funded by the guy who now owns a chunk of Southworst. And, a year earlier, Mondoweiss called out New Yorker for “Zion-washing” its profile of Singer. I have added both links to his Wiki profile; we’ll see if the changes stick. Given Wikipedia creator Jimmy Wales’ own well-known Zionism, I won’t hold my breath.)

The first cave (for the general public) was eliminating the old iconic “cattle car” open seating in fall 2024. (The actual first cave was a month earlier, with six board members stepping down and chairman and former CEO Gary Kelly agreeing to leave not too long later.)

As regular Southworst fliers know, the company ended its iconic “bags fly free” in the summer of 2025.

I had not, before that, taken a non-Southwest flight anywhere in more than a decade, probably since Southworst decided to not follow legacy airlines in not charging for checked bags.

That was even though, in October 2024, among the other changes, it had indicated bags would still fly free because an internal survey, per this story, said:

Southwest, which has built years of advertising campaigns around bags-fly-free, estimated that bag fees would raise about $1.5 billion a year, but eliminating the perk could drive away passengers, costing the airline $1.8 billion, or a net loss of $300 million a year.

But, nine months later, they decided to charge for bags anyway.

As a result, I flew American out of DFW rather than Southworst out of Love Field for New Year’s week time off last year.

OK.

Summer vacation time.

Closest major or semi-major airport to Yellowstone is Salt Lake City. Bozeman, Montana, actually had a nonstop on the AA, but omigod the rental car price difference humongous and not worth it.

So, Southworst it was.

And, my non-free bags, I learned, certainly didn’t pay to improve the flight experience. They probably are doing nothing but enriching Singer’s moneybags, which as a good Zionist, to get back to the second part of the header, means, they’re enriching Satanyahu’s bags, a legionary demon I am currently powerless to drive out.

And, Southworst it was.

Outbound from Love Field? More than an hour late.

Why? Our pilot was running another bird, and it was running late. Southworst has a habit of doing this. It’s happened to me personally at least once, if not twice, before.

Return from SLC? About 2.5 hours late. Our bird was coming with our pilot from Baltimore, and who knows where before that. The Midwestern heat dome and too early in the day for heavy thunderstorms shouldn’t have delayed it that much. But it did, including delays before Magic City.

But this is the new Southwest, per this airline industry website piece that notes it is LITERALLY at the bottom of the heap now on on-time percentage. Header:

65% On-Time: Southwest Falls From America’s Most Punctual To Rock Bottom
In 6 Months

Just wow.

Now, the piece notes this is in part due to Southworst’s flight model, which, while not fully point-to-point, is quasi-so, with a semi-hub backbone of sorts. (I long ago saw a term for this, never wrote it down or saved the website, and have never seen it again.) It does mean fewer cancellations, but at the expense of delays that mount up more and more, as well as spreading more and more within the system. Like a Zionist virus? Yes, I went there.

And, after giving you one chance? As I texted back on my Sunday phone alert when told my return flight would run late, after starting with “Fucktards,” said I would be looking American-first again on future flights.

Now, if only McKinney, northeast of Dallas, could expand their soon-to-be commercial airport and get Delta, United or — whoever else is left among the legacy, not the enshittified from the start JetBlue airlines of the world — anybody else reasonable there, per my story about signing up with the AA.

“Enshittification,” he said, per Cory Doctorow.

Yes, and like Southworst’s flight delays dominoing because of their operations model— and also, their long-enshittified crew scheduling software and system still not supposed to be updated until 2028, because “the chariots and horsemen and Merkavas and Uzis of Israel” need more money or something — this dominoed. (Anyway, the main point is that Southworst’s bags fees aren’t paying yet for fixes. If Paul Singer really cared, this would be addressed by now.)

 

My rental from Hertz? I didn’t thoroughly check when I left SLC’s rentals lot. I noticed when I stopped for a Coke in Ogden or wherever, that the back of the passenger side mirror was gone. Didn’t take a photo at the time, because, running late and Grand Teton is a long ways away. I didn’t notice until even later, and didn’t include it on my initial post-return report to Hertz, which enshittifiedly (I can invent that word) is limited to 500 words, that the vehicle had no driver’s floormat, either, so who knows how long it had been since they’d really checked it anyway? So now we get to see if Hertz accepts that, if that rental car insurance peddled by Travelocity is actually worth anything and more.

The 2.5 hours late on return flight? I didn’t get back home until midnight Sunday night/Monday, and didn’t get unwound enough and late-night fed enough to sleep until after 2 a.m. As I type this on Tuesday, I remain in a bit of brain fog. (SLC being hotter than the greater Metromess didn’t help, nor, probably, did me hiking in 100-plus heat up to the last half-hour before having to return the rental.)

I also couldn’t stop by a Barnes & Noble on the way home, as originally planned, to try to snag a copy of the new issue of Dave Campbell’s Texas Football, de rigueur for people in my line of work here in Tex-ass.

Scratch that. B&N ain’t open at 11 p.m. It would be (I think) at 8:30 p.m. on Sunday.

As for a vauntedly low cancellation rate? Per the Transportation Department itself, cancellations are the cause of ONLY ONE PERCENT of late arrivals. Do NOT NOT NOT let Southworst gaslight you on that.

Plus, isn’t a delay of 2.5 hours essentially a cancellation anyway?

Or, to put it in Paul Singer terms?

About 2.5 hours may be how often in a day an Israeli kills a Palestinian.

There.

If there were a god, I’d think I was being punished for some moral violations. I don’t even have that opening.

 ==

Southworst are also chickenshits. Can't find a specific email address I want on the website. They've deserted Shitter, with an account inactive for 2-plus years, as well as deserting Book of Face, where I no longer am. (They have no linked logo for either account.) They're not on Threads or Instagram, either. Only LinkedIn and Pinterest of all things. Social media as turd polishing is what that one is. 

Southwest has no Love for flying

CEO Gary Kelly is very bearish on the shorter-term future of flight. He says Southwest’s revenues per seat mile were down almost 10 percent in May vs. a year ago.

Delta latest legacy airline to further cut flights

With Delta’s pledge to cut its flight capacity 13 percent in the second half of 2008, up from 10 percent, about all the legacy airlines are in full retreat from high gas prices.

Delta’s case is complicated, of course, by its proposed takeover of Northwest.

That said, between the capacity cuts and the checked bag charges, I have to believe Southwest is sitting in the catbird seat. It’s given no indication so far that it will follow either trend.

I’ve not read Jim Jubak or other MSN analysts in a week or two, but, if I were buying stock later this year, I’d take a look at Southwest.

Southwest bullish in the face of high fuel costs

Southwest Airlines is expanding Denver service, with flights to San Francisco and Omaha, among other things, at a time when other airlines are cutting flights in order to force up costs, rather than adding more and more surcharges to flights.

To do so, Southwest will be keeping two airplanes that it had planned to retire. In all, it now plans to expand its fleet by a net of 13 airplanes this year, compared to the seven that it projected on April 17.

In all, Denver service will grow from 79 to 95 daily departures.

As often is the case, Southwest is playing against type. Since it continues to turn profits, it has the leverage to do this. Given that Frontier has filed for bankruptcy, Southwest has room to do this, and that can’t help Frontier’s reorganization plans.

This will also put pressure on United’s Denver hub, just as we all wonder whether it’s merger talks with Continental are still off, or about to turn on again.

Hmm — is a Continental/Frontier, or United/Frontier, marriage a possibility?

Funny, just a few years ago, Southwest was acting like somebody had put a gun to its head to force it to return to Denver. (It had refused to fly DIA for several years.)

That said, I’m still surprised that Southwest hasn’t cast an eye on Colorado Springs. The Springs has two problems; the airport is just accessed by a boulevard and not a freeway, and winter weather. But, the weather isn’t that cloudy, and if the Springs’ city government said it would provide freeway access as an economic development incentive, I think Southwest would have to jump; at the least, it would beat DIA over the head for lower landing fees, a Southwest specialty tactic.