- Southwest is testing several new ways to get passengers moving and onto their planes.
- The airline is using Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport as an "innovation zone," according to the Wall Street Journal.
- Among the new ideas are kiosks, special staging areas, and flashing lights at the start of boarding.
Long boarding times frustrate passengers and the flight attendants who usher them through the loading bridge and to their seats. But Southwest Airlines is on a mission to change that.
Southwest is testing several out-of-the-box methods at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, part of an effort to improve and expedite the boarding process, according to the Wall Street Journal.
The airline is using parts of the airport as a testing ground called the "innovation zone," where it is experimenting with 11 new concepts in hopes of slashing five minutes off the average flight's boarding time — which currently lasts 40 minutes for smaller jets and up to 50 for larger ones, per the Journal.
"We want to truly understand at its most granular level of detail how passengers move on and off our aircraft,'' Angela Marano, Southwest's vice president of business transformation, told the Journal. "How can we better understand some of the human behavior that slows that process down?''
The new boarding practices include highly visible changes like upbeat music on the jet bridge and video monitors that tell passengers when boarding will begin. The monitors also include lights that flash during boarding, according to the Journal.
"It's giving the customers, especially the customers coming in late or just not paying attention, information on when it is their turn," Kaci McCartan, senior innovation designer at Southwest, told the Journal.
But some of the airline's ideas are less consumer-facing, and focus on optimizing the boarding process from the airline's side of operations.
One idea Southwest is testing is a group chat between workers on the ground, on the plane, and at the gate — an addition that aims to improve coordination between airline employees, the Journal reported.
One further change the airline will test is self-serve kiosks at the gate, according to The Street. There, passengers can streamline the boarding process and potentially even upgrade their tickets before they get on a plane.
The tests in Atlanta further Southwest's ongoing efforts to reshape the way passengers board planes. The airline notoriously doesn't assign seats to its passengers — they get to choose where to sit when they get on the plane.
That boarding system also allows families to board and sit together on Southwest flights in what the company calls "Family Boarding," according to Cleveland's Fox8 news station.
For those families as well as wheelchair users, Southwest is also testing out a separate staging area aimed at easing access to the plane.
"If we spot stuff that works and it can work stand-alone, we will roll that out,'' Andrew Watterson, the airline's chief operating officer, told the Journal. "But we're not looking for all quickies. At the end of this we want to get our turn times down five minutes and have it be in a quality, customer-friendly way.''