Disregarding boarding order, he was kicked off the flight for tweeting a complaint. What’s SWA’s policy for complaining then? What are their passenger guidelines for social media? What would be the policy if the flight was in the air already? What if he tweeted on the ground, but it was found by SWA’s team while the flight was airborne? What is he waited until they were at his destination before he tweeted?
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I had to look that one up, but no, “cool,” obvs.
Now I’m confused: on SWA, does each person get their own boarding group number, irrespective of anyone else in their group? So, if you’re traveling with two adults and three children, is it possible to have 5 different boarding groups?
Because that would justify a nasty tweet.
Here’s the easy answer. They don’t separate groups for standard ticketing. What happened was that the father was differently ticketed than the two kids. He was a member of the Southwest A-List Program, and that got him Priority Check-in. The kids weren’t members of the same program, and he’d just been taking advantage of his status in that program to get his full family on the plane before other people. This was just one of the times (or the first time) that he got called out on it.
Here’s the thing, to get A-List privileges, they Southwest clearly expects you to be a frequent flyer business traveller. You earn the status this way:
To qualify for A-List status, you will need to fly 25 Southwest Airlines one-way qualifying flights or earn 35,000 Tier Qualifying points per calendar year. To qualify for A-List Preferred status, you will need to fly 50 Southwest Airlines one-way qualifying flights or earn 70,000 Tier Qualifying points per calendar year.
Here are the program benefits:
As an A-List Member, you will enjoy Priority Check-in and Fly By Priority Lanes (where available), a dedicated A-List phone line, reserved checkin, standby priority, and a 25 percent earnings bonus on all eligible revenue Southwest flights.
So, just the one person is covered. Not only that: they have a milage count for earning a “Companion Pass”.
To qualify for a Companion Pass, you will need to earn 110,000 points from any combination of Southwest Airlines flights and Rapid Rewards Partners per calendar year, or fly 100 Southwest Airlines one-way qualifying flights per calendar year.
So he must have known that his kids weren’t covered by the program, and when traveling with them, he needed to exercise some patience rather than be pushy.
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Thanks!
That’s what I thought I understood, but then there were a couple of posts that made it sound like a family could have more than two boarding groups, which is where I started wondering if that meant it was individually-assigned.
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I dunno…this is what comes to mind when I hear “duff”:
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So what? She should be held accountable for her actions.
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I agree.
But she should be held accountable to her employers, not to the Twitterverse.
If the guy had omitted her gate assignment and name from his pissy little tweet, then he could have retained the moral high ground. By putting so much identifying information in his tweet, he legitimized her sense that her safety was threatened by his loud-but-little complaint.
If he had called SWA customer service after his flight was over and asked to speak to an A-List concierge† he might have been able to wheedle some sort of compensation for the imagined slight he suffered.
See @catgrin 's fine analysis, about three posts upthread, for an explanation about why it was an imagined slight.
But he wasn’t mad at SWA, he was mad at that one, specific agent. And he wanted to punish her for not giving him what he wanted, when he wanted it. So his angry tweet contained enough identifying information to make finding that exact person almost trivially simple for anyone who had occasion to pass through that Denver airport.
As another commenter said upthread:
†I don’t actually know that there is such a thing as an A-List “concierge” but I can hardly imagine an “A-List” service that didn’t have some sort of perk along those lines.
Fine, we can agree SWA had no right asking him to delete the tweet. That is an obscene reason to pull a family off a plane!
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You might want to consider what his physical behavior was like. I watched a few interviews with him, and he kept changing his story. (In one interview, he altered the wording of the tweet so it didn’t say her name or location at all.) What I can tell you is that there wasn’t just a tweet - there was a verbal exchange that even he did describe as “terse”. What he may have thought was “terse” could very easily have been threatening to a female who didn’t know him.
He clearly believed he could do what he wanted to do, regardless of the rules and that he could just steamroller the attendant into complying because he was “A-list”.
If you think this is SWA’s fault, here’s a review that may show otherwise. Not just SWA, but at least one other company may have caught his ire: he possibly wrote this review on foursquare of Caribou Coffee in Minneapolis (they’re rated 6.9/10). Most people seem to love 'em.
Duff W.
I think you can tell a lot about people on how they treat their delivery drivers. The women at this store are straight rude.
Duff Watson · February 27
Since he clearly did behave badly - giving his daughters the idea that they could just ignore rules and bully people into giving them what they want - I don’t think you should be assigning all that blame to the airline. (Blame them when they actually deserve it.) Maybe Duff should have been a more responsible (and patient) adult.
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