Bags Fly Free? Not Anymore!

For a long time "Bags Fly Free!" has a slogan of Southwest Airlines. The airline differentiated itself from other US carriers with customer-friendly policies. They offered as easy ticket changes and refunds without harsh penalty fees years before other airlines adopted the same, and allowed all passengers two checked bags without fees for years after other airlines all moved to charging $50, $75, or more. As of today, that's no longer.



Southwest announced today that the "Bags Fly Free" era is over. They'll still give a free checked baggage allowance to elites and those flying on the most expensive ticket class. That's in line with other US carriers.

This is part of a broader effort to realign Southwest to be just like all the other US airlines. As I noted in December when Southwest announced a move to assigned seating it's nominally in the name of "competitiveness" but really it's removing key differentiators that helped Southwest compete with— and, for decades, be more profitable than— other carriers.

Oh, and along with this change, Southwest also announced a new, lower class of tickets. The old "Wanna Get Away" fare category is being replaced with "Basic". Similar to other carriers' Basic Economy tickets it comes with fewer conveniences than ever before. These tickets will not permit changes, standby, or transferable credits.

Five Years of the Coronavirus Pandemic

Today' the fifth anniversary of the Coronavirus pandemic. Five years ago today, on 11 March 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared Coronavirus a global pandemic. As I wrote in my blog that day, classifying it a pandemic was debatable and political. But I meant those terms positively. It was debatable because the definition of what's a pandemic involves subjective terms; and political because determining it was a pandemic would open up more political solutions. Governments that might not act in the face of a regional health concern, something happening "over there" and "to some people", could be prodded to act against what international health experts deemed a global problem potentially affecting everyone.

A common question I've seen posed in a lot of writing about this 5th anniversary is, "What's changed and what hasn't since then?" To answer that question it's important to be able to go back to that point in time and understand what was happening then. I fortunately have my own record of it: my blog. Take a look at my blog's table of contents page from March 2020 to see the things I was writing about in real time then.

One thing I was struck by in revisiting my contemporaneous writing was how Covid denialism was there pretty much from the beginning. Denials started started with China, of course. China's dictatorship covered up the seriousness of the problem to protect their reputation and keep their own populace in line. But very quickly the US political right, led by President Trump, started pounding Covid as a hoax ginned up by domestic political opponents to make him look bad in a reelection year and gain dictatorial control over the US. Trump had already established a daily cadence of calling it a hoax even before the WHO deemed it a global pandemic. And now, 5 years later, President Trump elected for a nonconsecutive second term has pulled the US out of the WHO.

It's sad to be reminded of just how quickly the situation with Coronavirus turned from political in the good sense— able to spur governments into action— into political in the bad sense, falling prey to partisan differences and demagoguery. It's still with us today. Covid denialism has become a tenet of the political right. And it's actually spread. Denialism has become a political way of life. The MAGA movement churns out "alternative facts" on pretty much every issue of the day. Undocumented immigrants are causing a crime wave, rooting out fraud in government spending has saved billions of dollars in just a few weeks, vaccines are worse than the diseases they supposedly prevent, tariffs lower prices, and the stock market isn't crashing because of the chaos coming from the White House. Don't believe your lying eyes when they tell you otherwise.