Every budget-minded air passenger in the United States already knows that longtime no-frills kingpin Southwest Airlines is in bad trouble.
The list of woes is daunting: Repeated operational meltdowns forcing the cancellation of thousands of flights at a time, including in peak holiday season.
A heightened safety review by the FAA following several near-miss incidents and abnormally low-flying flights.
Brutally withering takedowns of its poor service on Saturday Night Live. (“You bought a Southwest ticket. You obviously don’t respect yourself.”)
Given that litany of ineptitude—and the recent announcement that the airline would soon end its famous open seating policy and begin issuing assigned seating—regular travelers have rightly asked if Southwest Airlines would continue to offer two free checked bags for each passenger. Nearly every other airline abandoned the freebie many years ago.
Southwest is no longer known for standing firm on its maverick individuality. After all, Southwest was one of the first airlines to abandon the courtesy of social distancing in the darkest days of Covid-19, and since July 2024, the airline has been under the control of Elliot Investment Management, which is adopting a slew of radical changes to salvage the bottom line.
Surely Southwest will soon announce that it wants a piece of the $33 billion that the airline industry reportedly makes each year from checked bag fees.
This week, Southwest held an investor meeting in Dallas that gave us our answer.
While Southwest executives told its investors that they think the airline could make as much as $1.5 billion a year from checked bag fees, they also estimate that if it began charging for bags, it would lose $1.8 billion in market share.
Which is an accountant’s way of saying that without free checked bags, Southwest doesn’t have enough going for it for customers to keep choosing it.
Of course, if Southwest’s market share drops, the mathematical formula that protects free checked bags could change as well. And the airline’s future popularity is on the bubble as it implements sweeping cuts, including a 20–30% reduction in inter-island Hawaiian flights and a looming drop in Atlanta routes, reducing coverage there from 37 cities to 21.
Southwest is also placing its betting chips on new redeye flights, which can be affordable but are not most passengers’ favorite way to fly domestically. That will put another question mark on the airline’s popularity.
But for now, we have a dollar amount for the retention of our cherished free checked bags. Right now, the juice is officially not worth the squeeze.
As long as Southwest isn’t deemed to be good enough to succeed without it, Southwest’s free baggage policy will stick around.
Maybe we can convince SNL to mock it again—just to ensure we can keep free baggage forever.
