Southwest Airlines & “Customers of Size”

Yes, that is what Southwest Airlines refers to large people as – “Customer of Size”. I think the term “Southwest Two Seater” is more appropriate (I place myself in this category). This past week a PR firestorm irrupted for Southwest Airlines when, through a series of events, a well known movie director was removed from a Southwest flight for being too large to fit into one seat (flight was full, no spare seats available). Needless to say he was not happy, and made it well known in real time via his Twitter account. You can read the news article here, Kevin Smith’s blog post about the incident here, and Southwest Airlines open apology here, you can be the judge.

I was obviously not there, and I do hold the position that if you do “spill over” into a second seat you should be forced to purchase a second seat, but I do believe (as I wrote in a past blog post) that Southwest Airlines is famous for arbitrarily picking out large customers and asking them to buy a second seat without letting them prove they can fit into one seat. The situation with Kevin Smith seems very shady (after reading statements from both sides), so I would place my bets that Southwest Airlines was just doing what they are becoming famous for: singling out large customers and making knee jerk decisions before examining all the facts.