Southwest Airlines Celebrates Assigned Seating in New Commercial
Earlier this year, Southwest Airlines announced that it would be moving away from its longstanding open seating policy and moving forward with an assigned seating model. As it nears time for Southwest to implement this change, the airline is celebrating with a new ad to share the news with customers.
This week, Southwest Airlines debuted a new 30-second advertisement celebrating the news of the assigned seating. The ad featured scenes of rucuous celebration, including people leaping over tables, doing high kicks in the street, and dancing in a public fountain.
In a recent interview with Adweek, Southwest Airlines director of brand and content Julia Melle opened up a bit about the vision for the celebratory nature of the ad.
“That over-the-top celebratory nature was important—people going crazy about news that didn’t seem that new to the world,” Melle said. Amping up the satire “feels uniquely Southwest,” she told Adweek.
“The tone [of the spot] had to be tongue-in-cheek—anything else would have felt off brand,” added Bill Bayne, group creative director at GSD&M. “This is a brand that’s been doing its own way of seat selection for years, so we knew it was important to show that we ‘get it.’ So we used humor and a healthy dose of self-awareness. As Herb Kelleher said, ‘We take our competition seriously, not ourselves.’”
Bayne's comments make reference to Southwest’s founder, who famously sketched out the airline’s business plan on a cocktail napkin in 1967, with a vision of a fun airline that did not take itself too seriously.
While moving to assigned seating is certainly a significant change for the airline, Melle told Adweek that the airline was simply responding to consumer preferences.
“Eighty percent of our customers and 86% of airline customers [overall] prefer assigned seats,” she said, “so we knew we had to take a look at our model and change it.”
Southwest is looking to move fully to its assigned seating model at some point in early 2026.