Southwest Airlines spent decades selling you exactly one thing no other airline would: free bags. It showed up in every commercial and every earnings call, unchanged for years. Then in May 2025, Southwest killed it.
The reaction was instant and confident. Fitch Ratings warned that adding bag fees risked “eroding Southwest’s competitive strengths relative to peers.” One travel analyst put it more bluntly: the timing “could not have been worse.” The new fees started at $35 for the first bag and $45 for the second, then climbed to $45 and $55 later that year when fuel costs spiked during the Iran conflict. Analysts predicted defections. Customers posted their outrage. Everyone waited for the loyalty to crack.
It didn’t. Southwest posted $227 million in net income in the first quarter of 2026, a sharp turnaround from a $149 million loss the year before. Revenue hit $7.249 billion, a first-quarter record, up 12.8 percent, and the airline said the growth came largely from bag fees and seat assignments — the exact stuff people swore they’d punish the company for charging.
Customers didn’t even really leave. J.D. Power’s 2026 airline satisfaction study still ranked Southwest first in its category, fifth year running. The lead shrank, though, from 31 points over second-place Delta down to just 3. So the grumbling was real. It just wasn’t real enough to change anyone’s ticket.
Southwest isn’t even the outlier anymore. American and United now charge $45 for a first bag online and $55 for a second, jumping to $50 and $60 if you pay at the counter. Delta matches that $45/$55 tier. JetBlue runs $39 to $49 for a first bag depending on the season, $59 to $69 for a second. Do the rounding and nearly every major U.S. carrier lands inside the same roughly $90-to-$100 window for two checked bags on a round trip. Nobody colluded on that number. They just all ran the math and landed on it separately.
Here’s my problem with getting outraged about this: there isn’t one. A company found a price the market would bear and charged it. That’s not corruption or a scam. That’s a business doing business. Nobody’s entitled to a free checked bag any more than they’re entitled to a free seat upgrade. The reason this doesn’t bother me the way a utility jacking up your electric bill while posting record profits does is simple: you can’t fire your power company. You can absolutely fire your airline. Every one of these carriers is competing for your ticket every time you book one, and they still landed on the fee anyway. That’s not a market failing you. That’s a market telling you the fee isn’t the dealbreaker you assumed it was.
Which makes the real story here the gap nobody’s filled. Spirit invented the bare-fare-plus-fees playbook, then got copied out of existence — it shut down for good on May 2, after legacy carriers adopted the same fee stack and erased the one edge Spirit had: being cheaper. Frontier’s still running that model alone now. But no major carrier is pulling the other lever, the “we’re still the one who doesn’t do this” pitch, for customers annoyed enough to pay a little more for it. That opening is sitting right there, untouched, in an industry that insists it competes on price.
My two cents: the fee was never the outrage. Nobody building the airline that cashes in on people being annoyed about it — that’s the part actually worth being annoyed about.