Nuts About Southwest

As a SWA family member and frequent flyer at swa, good for you flight crew. I am personally tired of having to turn the other way because I accidentally looked over and saw the woman with the ( new meaning ) cut off shorts and saw her buisness without undies. Or the woman who is on a full family flight out of Orlando to Providence in a tube top, that's right a tube top I could see the lower half of her bare breast maybe even a little ^%^ple, yikes. Or the time I saw a girl wearing a bikini top. Please put a stop to the almost nude maddness. We should ask ourselves is this offensive to my mom? just like we ask ourselves would we want our mom on that flight? NO.

Colleen,
Thank you for acknowledging the situation. I hope for all concerned that your message involving no dress code filters down to your employees. I also am hoping that your employees will remember this issue and unless there is a safety issue, treat their customers customers with the respect and dignity they would like to be treated if they were on the receiving end. I do believe that SWA will be encountering some more questions about employee training and the actions taken against the offending employee. Thank you again for listening and finally addressing the issue.

Part two

More from the Mini Skirt Fare Announcement:

"Southwest Airlines today faces
the bare facts and reveals the naked truth."

"Some have said we've gone from loving hot pants to having hot flashes but
nothing could be farther from the truth, "said Southwest's CEO Gary Kelly.
"The publicity caught us with our pants down, quite frankly. The story has
such great legs

Makes Kelly sound like a dope.

While I think this apology should have come much earlier than it did, I'm glad to see that SWA has apologized for it's error, and publicly admitted to the mistake.

Good job!

Sorry Hun,

Too little, too late.

And to top it off, now you're trying to gain commercially from an appalling, disgusting and discriminatory action by your employee and your airline in general. I have lost all my respect for Southwest and the corporate culture that permitted and then ignored this reprehensible action. A company that treats a paying customer the way you did deserves to have its corporate pants sued off of it. And then Kyla can complain about how YOU are dressed.

Say goodbye to my business on Bradley-Midway.

Sean from Connecticut

Debra,
Am I to interpret "SWA family member" as that you are an employee of SWA? If not, the following does not apply to you and I apologize. If so, did you read the statement by your president about NO DRESS CODE and the customer? If yes, your attitude that you are "tired" of your customers looking the way they do, just shows that you have anti-customer sentiment and are willing to degrade customers just on their looks. I am not trying to "scold" anyone here but I would suggest that you restrict your anti-customer opinions to the break room or the "water cooler" where your fellow employees can share your opinions. "Anti-customer sentiment" or degrading comments about customers on this public blog, is just going to keep this topic alive and SWA will have to field more criticism by the travelling public as to why their employees just don't get it.

Thank you for finally addressing this matter publicly, humorously and appropriately.

While I certainly agree with some of the above comments on appropriateness of clothing for flying, I do not believe the clothes in this particular instance warranted the treatment Ms. Ebberts received. The was no indication that pulling a Britney Spears, so I guess you can chalk it up to experience and hope that all involved learned a lesson.

By the way, the "story has great legs" comment was priceless!

I just want to say way to go!! I am really tired of women dressing like harlots. If that lady wanted to dress that way she should not have been apologized to. She knew exactly how she was dressing when she put her clothes on that morning. There were probably children on that flight who did not need to see all that mess. What kind of message are these women trying to send anyway?!!

As clever as it is, this apology is ambiguous and insulting to your front-line employees. If you mean to say that the front line employee erred, come out and say it. If you're saying that your damage control effort failed, that much is obvious to everyone. If you mean to point out that Kyla's story is PR-motivated and incorrect, step forward with the facts that only Southwest has. If you want to avoid taking any position at all, congratulations!

"These situations are subjective, and not everyone holds the same opinions."

OK, so how about telling us the facts so we can have informed opinions rather than uninformed and prejudiced guesses?

For example: Did another passenger complain? If so, exactly what was that complaint, word for word? Do your employees contend that he clothing was configured differently than the way she appeared in interviews? If so, what were the differences? Is there any substance at all to the rumors of missing or thong underwear? If not, would you please quash them immediately?

If a customer is falsely maligning you in the media, you can afford to make an exception to normal policy about making the customer look bad . This passenger has presented her story in the media, and most people will assume that story is correct and complete unless and until Southwest tells its side. You owe your front line employees that much.

I've said it before, but if Kyla appeared on the aircraft EXACTLY as she appeared in the interviews, I doubt anyone would have asked her to change, and any such request would have been an error, in my opinion. If her appearance was different on the flight, the public needs to hear the specifics so that they can feel confident in the judgment of Southwest's front line employees.

In summary: Depending on the facts, your backhanded apology is either too much or too little. I tend to believe that Southwest employees acted reasonably because in my 700 or more flights as a customer I have never seen anything else. But if you won't step forward with the facts to defend your company or your employees, why should anyone else defend you?

I know Herb is a lawyer, but this evasiveness is ridiculous. Defend your company properly and then have Herb challenge Kyla to a Hula contest for $5000. That's a win-win.

I learned of this "news" breaking story via Fox News. I was astonished that this issue was considered newsworthy, and ignorantly brushed off the issue, simply because women now-a-days typically dress like "halloween" for lack of a better word; I think that I have been desensitized to this type of dress attire. However, I found myself in the pool of society wherein, we just "accept" certain things about our society because of its commonality, and when I found myself pondering about thsi type of "acceptance" I recoiled at my cowardice to stand up for the basic minimal standards of society, and what this society was once, dignified by.

Moreover, I became drawn to this issue and anticipated Southwest's response to all of its critics. While Southwest did excellent media and marketing damage control to diffuse this issue, I believe that Southwest did more to encourage society's acceptance of things without considering, if any, the positive, hard-nosed incentives against the acceptance of women dressing like halloween. My fiancee and I travel frequently, and quite frankly, I am disgusted to see women, from teenage girls to women--old enough to be my mother--dressing like halloween--what has our society come to, where we allow our women and encourage our women to dress so whorishly, like halloween? In short, these women leave nothing to the imagination, and they also, don't promote a positive-standard of dignity and respect for the younger women to follow as an example. What's more is that, these type of women with simple minded attitudes that "No one tells me what do, and I will do what I want to do," are same women who complain when a man calls them a whore or hoe or bitch, or cries when men treat them as second class and are used only, for one-night stands. To paraphrase Dave Chappell, "If a women is dressed inappropriately and you are really not that way, don't get mad at [us men] because you are certainly dressed in a hoe's uniform."

Southwest congrats on taking some kind of stand against what is typically acceptable, I just hope for the sake of your kids, my kids and others that this company will stand behind its employees and implement and maintain, any and all, consequences to prevent (instead of rewarding the halloween dressers) passengers (customers) who think they have a right to reveal all of their assets--which they have the right to--to discourage dressing like halloween in certain public areas; it is a matter of public policy and decency, have some decency and cover up, go home or to the club and "sport" your hoe's uniform at the proper venus.