Yes. I'm a very frequent flyer, and used to be far more frequent. No one, and I mean no one, flys southwest because it's their choice. "Southwest is the greyhound of the sky" is a well known phrase. You fly southwest because it's slightly better than being cramped on 3 legs of a 50-60 seat commuter jet. Your home airport dictates which airline you take. Unless another airline steps up and takes some of the routes & provides better planes, you're stuck with SWA.
> No one, and I mean no one, flys southwest because it's their choice.
I wholeheartedly disagree. I don't fly SW except to save money, but everyone else I've spoken to with an opinion on airlines loves to say how much they love the carrier.
Coworkers and I went to look at the sea of unclaimed bags yesterday, and I mentioned that SW has drastically underpaid ground crews and have flight crews sleeping in crew rooms in airports, and they said that they'd repeatedly heard how much flight crews enjoy working for the company.
I really don't understand the appeal, but it's definitely out there.
Alaska
Hawaiian
[Delta American United Southwest] (rough tie here)
Frontier
Spirit
It depends on what you value. If you always fly first class, of course SW is worse. SW does offer a lot of direct flights that no other airlines offer. For me saving several hours in not changing planes is worth a slightly worse flight experience.
Also SW doesn't gouge you when cancelling or changing flights, unlike all the others.
In the Midwest I know a ton of business travelers (>1 trip/month) who default to Southwest. The weekly travelers tend to prefer the legacy carriers if they're available (so I'm sure there's something to your point even here) but IME Southwest rules the monthly/short notice flyers around me.
Weekly travelers prefer legacy carriers because they get upgraded to fist class, have special phone numbers for customer service and rebooking, board first, etc.
> No one, and I mean no one, flys southwest because it's their choice.
Everyone in my family preferred to fly southwest (at least before this round of incidents). Among other things, this was based on a history of better customer service especially in extenuating circumstances. They've been at the top of e.g. JD power customer satisfaction rankings for years.
If you're trying to say no one flies economy because it's their choice... I could certainly afford not to, but I _choose_ otherwise.
In various parts of the US there are sketchy bus companies with unpredictable and unreliable service that are cheaper than Greyhound. One example is the busses between New York and nearby large cities. They tend to accumulate accident records, close, and re-open under a new name. Boarding involves standing in a scrum they vaguely measure.
