Airline Announces Plus-Size Passengers Will Need To Purchase Two Seats From Next Year

ByMF Jones

Southwest Airlines has announced that ‘plus-size’ passengers will need to fork out for an extra seat starting in 2026, and the news doesn’t seem to have gone down well with that demographic of passengers.

This replaces Southwest Airlines’s previous ‘Customers of Size‘ policy, which offered plus-size passengers a second seat at no extra cost…

Tigress Osborn, the executive director of the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance, deemed the overhaul changes “devastating” for plus-size flyers.

She said: “Southwest was the only beacon of hope for many fat people who otherwise wouldn’t have been flying. And now that beacon has gone out.”

Jason Vaughn, an Florida-based travel agent who shares travel tips for plus-size tourists on his website Fat Travel Tested, agreed.

He said: “I think it’s going to make the flying experience worse for everybody. They have no idea anymore who their customer is. They have no identity left.”

I’m not sure what the hell he’s waffling about because I’m pretty sure Southwest Airlines’s customers are not exclusively obese diabetics who need an extra seat on the house just to accommodate them on a flight. I get that Tigress Osborn and Jason Vaughn make a living by standing up for the rights of plus-sized people, but how deluded do you have to be to think that this actually “makes flying worse for everybody”? In what sense?

If anything, imagine how much better the flying experience is going to be for passengers who can now rest their elbow on the armrest without having it come into contact with someone else’s sweaty gut? Imagine also how annoying it is for the passenger who gets fined £25 because their check-in bag is 1kg overweight, only to see another passenger who is twice their size get an extra seat all to themselves for free.

All in all, a sensible business move by Southwest Airlines, and perhaps another indicator of the direction things are going in regard to “wokeism”. It was only a couple of years back that the airline introduced the ‘Customers of Size’ policy, and they’ve already binned it. Of course, anyone with a brain could’ve told you it made no sense in the first place. 

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