Southwest Airlines has spent the past two years remaking itself — new boarding procedures, revised baggage fees, an overhauled loyalty structure — and the question hanging over every change is whether the carrier has traded its identity for operational respectability. Jeb Brooks set out to answer that question empirically, booking a series of flights departing from Chicago Midway International Airport (MDW) and touching down across Southwest's network — including Atlanta, Nashville, Orlando, Austin, Houston Hobby, Dallas Love Field, Denver, Las Vegas, Phoenix, Los Angeles, and Oakland. After 12 flights, his verdict is measured but pointed: Southwest Airlines has executed a competent transformation, but at the cost of the differentiated experience that once made it worth choosing.

The New Boarding Process: A Genuine Improvement

Brooks is unambiguous on one point: the replacement of Southwest's famously chaotic open-seating free-for-all with an assigned-seat boarding process is a functional upgrade. He describes the new system as among the smoothest available on any U.S. carrier, noting that the gate experience is now orderly and predictable in a way it never was under the old cattle-call model.

The new boarding process is among the smoothest you'll find on any airline.

That praise, however, is the high-water mark of the review. Brooks is careful to separate the boarding experience — a ground-level operational metric — from the broader question of what Southwest now offers passengers relative to its legacy and its competitors. The boarding fix, he implies, was the easy part.

This marks Brooks's fifth dedicated Southwest Airlines coverage in seven years, following a broadly positive 2019 review titled "Why People 'Luv' Southwest Airlines" and a more celebratory 2024 solar eclipse flight, "Solar Eclipse 2024: EPIC Southwest Flight into TOTALITY" — making this his most critical assessment of the carrier to date.

Punctuality and Fees: Where the Airline Fails

The on-time performance data Brooks presents is damaging. Across his 12-flight sample, he reports that three-quarters of departures were delayed — a figure that undermines any claim Southwest might make to operational reliability in 2026. For a carrier that built its reputation on high-frequency, point-to-point efficiency, a 75% late-departure rate is not a rounding error; it is a structural failure.

75% of our flights left late.

The baggage policy change draws equally sharp criticism. Southwest's two free checked bags were, for decades, the single most tangible differentiator between the carrier and its low-cost peers — a genuine consumer benefit that justified booking Southwest even when fares were not the cheapest. Brooks notes that this policy has now been eliminated, with passengers charged for checked luggage in line with industry norms. The move brings Southwest closer to the model of carriers like Spirit Airlines and Frontier Airlines, which Brooks has previously reviewed and found wanting on value grounds.

The timing of this review is notable in the context of peer coverage. Josh Cahill examined the same policy shift four months earlier in "Southwest Airlines is UPSETTING Millions of Travelers with this Change!", arriving at a similarly mixed verdict — praising crew service while criticising the end of open seating. Noel Philips, reviewing Southwest the same month as Brooks in "How Many Times Can I Fly America's Busiest Route in One Day?", encountered a day of delays and missed connections — corroborating Brooks's punctuality findings from a different vantage point.

Verdict: Competent, But No Longer Distinctive

Brooks's summary judgment is the kind of conclusion that is harder to recover from than outright condemnation. Southwest has not become a bad airline; it has become an unremarkable one. The boarding process works. The crews, by implication, remain friendly. But the free bags are gone, the flights are frequently late, and the Rapid Rewards loyalty programme has been restructured in ways that erode the straightforward value proposition the carrier once offered.

All told, after 12 flights, our biggest observation is that Southwest has simply lost some of its magic.

The phrase "lost some of its magic" is precise in a way that a harsher verdict would not be. Southwest has not collapsed; it has converged. It now resembles the mainstream U.S. carriers — American Airlines, Delta Air Lines, United Airlines — that Brooks has spent years benchmarking, without yet matching their reliability or premium product depth. For a carrier whose entire brand identity rested on being genuinely different, that convergence is the most damaging finding of all.