I am a big fan of Southwest Airlines, have talked-up and written about them before. So it’s confusing why this incident had to happen. (Variously referred to as the ‘too fat to fly’ snafu).

So while it was time Southwest explained what the policy was –a so-called ‘Customer Size Policy that they explained here — it was not winning anything. After-the-fact PR and damage control is not going to clean up the mess.  United Airlines learned it very recently.  Sure Mr. Smith has great tweets and some 1.6 million followers.

But you have to assume every passenger is a Kevin Smith with a network, and a voice, and an audience, even if it is an audience of a few dozen followers.