Most of us don’t book an economy class plane ticket with comfort in mind. But that’s especially true for travelers in bigger bodies. 

“I’m not just fat, I’m fat and tall. I’m six feet tall,” said Sydney Henry-Ueno, a San Jose, California-based travel buff who flies about five times a year. “Trying to cram this body into a little bitty seat is more than a notion.”

Rather than squeeze into an airline seat that doesn’t accommodate her, Henry-Ueno books either one business class or two neighboring economy class tickets. Both options are expensive and don’t necessarily stop other passengers from bothering her. 

“People will give you a look, a side eye. Or make comments that they think are under their breath, but loud enough for me to hear,” Henry-Ueno said. “Like, ‘you know, if you dieted, you wouldn’t have to get an extra seat.’ Just making a lot of assumptions about what a person’s body is all about.” 

Henry-Ueno is willing to shell out for her comfort and safety. She doesn’t want that rudeness from seat neighbors to escalate into hostility. But there’s one airline that gives her a break on the cost of extra space. 

“In fact whenever we fly domestically it’s primarily Southwest because of their customer of size policy,” Henry-Ueno said. 

In its current form, Southwest’s customer of size policy allows passengers who “encroach upon the neighboring seat(s)” to book a second seat in advance and get refunded after their trip. Customers can also request a second seat when they arrive at their gate and the airline will typically sort it out. 

“That made Southwest, for many years, the best plus size passenger policy in the world,” said Tigress Osborn, executive director of the National Association for the Advancement of Fat Acceptance. “Fat people considered Southwest a friend, even though it started as ‘South-worst’ to us.” 

Osborn said the airline took incremental steps to be more inclusive of larger-bodied customers after a 2010 incident went viral. Film director Kevin Smith was ejected from a Southwest flight for taking up too much space and live-tweeted the experience. For some customers, Osborn said Southwest’s inclusive policy put air travel within financial reach for the first time. 

“It made it possible for some of us to travel when we hadn’t been traveling otherwise. And that is really life changing,” Osborn said. “So having that go away is really scary for a lot of people.”

On Jan. 27, when Southwest sunsets its popular open-seating policy, its accommodations for customers of size will also change. Customers will need to book their second seat proactively and will only be eligible for a refund for their second seat if their flight isn’t fully booked. About 80% of Southwest flights are typically full. 

“If Southwest is no longer loyal to customers of size, that opens us up to flying with whoever is most affordable and most convenient at the time,” Osborn said. “We are hoping that other airlines will see this customer base that was incredibly loyal to Southwest for years and start thinking about how they can be more accommodating for larger people.” 

But Ganesh Sitaraman, a professor at Vanderbilt Law School and the author of the book “Why Flying is Miserable,” doesn’t see that happening. 

“It really comes down to revenue. ​I mean, if you're an airline and you want to be able to make more money, an easy way to do that is to fly more passengers,” Sitaraman said. 

Since Congress deregulated the airline industry in the 1970s, Sitaraman said airlines have competed on price rather than quality of service. As part of that race to the bottom, he said airlines have shrunk passenger space even as Americans have gotten larger. There’s little incentive for airlines to offer no-cost accommodations to larger bodied travelers who might otherwise pay extra for the space they need. Over the years and as recently as 2023, Sitaraman said U.S. courts and regulators have declined to standardize passenger seat size and leg room. 

“It really, to me, speaks to a bigger question of, what kind of airline experience should we have, and why is this something that we can't do better with?” Sitaraman said. 

Southwest declined an interview request from Marketplace, but said its move to assigned seating requires it to adjust its customer of size policy and that both changes put it in line with industry standards. For former Southwest loyalist Sydney Henry-Ueno, that’s exactly the problem. 

“They’re leaving a whole lot of money on the table,” she said. 

When the customer of size policy changes, Henry-Ueno said she’ll shop around for the cheapest airfare and likely have to reign in her travel budget. 

“I hate using this word, but it's unfair,” Henry-Ueno said. “Just because my body is different from someone else's, and that's really what it comes down to, you're forcing us to spend more money.”