On Southwest Airlines new family boarding policy

[ChipWrecked]

Some may know that Southwest Airlines recently changed its boarding policy to disallow families with small children from preboarding. These families, if they don't have an 'A' pass, now board after the 'A' group. If all members have 'A' boarding passes, they board right in the crunch with the business flyers and non-breeders.

My family recently completed a four-leg trip on Southwest. My vent on their blog regarding the change follows:

I posted earlier that I would withhold judgment on this program until we finished our trip (wife, 4 year-old, lap baby, and myself). The trip is over, and I do not like this program. It seems clear to me this policy is a way to segregate families to the back of the plane. When we preboarded in the past, we sat up front by the bulkhead. This prevented another passenger’s seat from being kicked or otherwise disturbed by the preschooler. Try as we might, we cannot always prevent this from happening over five hours of flight time, so on this trip SWA had multiple unhappy passengers: Us, and those who had to sit in front of our 4 year-old.Good luck with your family-segregation-ghetto policy, Southwest. We will not fly this airline again.


Have any other posters with young'uns flown Southwest since this new policy was implemented? What did you think?