Southwest Airlines Moving Forward With Another Change
Earlier this year Southwest Airlines officially moved forward with a controversial change to its boarding process with travelers selecting an assigned seat ahead of time rather than being assigned a boarding group.
"All tickets purchased for travel starting Jan. 27, 2026, will feature assigned seating. Moreover, Southwest Airlines Customers can choose their preferred fare bundle, including the opportunity to purchase assigned and premium seating and select a seat at booking," the airline said in a statement at the time.
"Customers connecting into the Southwest network from transoceanic journeys with airline partners, currently Icelandair and China Airlines, will be able to select seats for all flights in their itineraries."
Now another change is in the works, but this one will be more subtle.
Southwest Airlines Announces New AI Partnership
Earlier this week Southwest Airlines announced it's partnering with Amazon Web Services as its preferred cloud provider to "modernize its technology foundation and evolve how the airline operates, builds, and is able to serve its customers."
As part of the new partnership, Southwest is expected to transition from a largely on-premises environment to a cloud-based, AI- and agent-enabled architecture on AWS by 2028.
"Southwest has always evolved our business with a focus on improving performance, efficiency, and reliability-and applying that same mindset to our technology with AWS is a core part of that strategy," Lauren Woods, Executive Vice President & Chief Information Officer at Southwest Airlines said in a statement.
"From customer experience, to operations, to how we build the systems behind it-all of it is coming together in a way that helps our teams move faster, make better decisions, and deliver for our customers."
Change Coming to Southwest's Website
In addition to bringing the business into a cloud based environment, Southwest will also be making changes to its website as it attempts to modernize the customer-facing platform.
"Historically, the platform has operated a large footprint of on-premises systems with long modernization timelines. By leveraging Kiro to refactor legacy code, Southwest has accelerated that effort significantly," Southwest said.
"This work is creating a foundation that is easier to evolve, scale, and support-helping Southwest move faster and automate tasks in minutes that used to take hours."
Southwest will also be using the new AI partnership to help transform its software around the company.
Related: Southwest Airlines Reverses Course on Major Change
This story was originally published by Men's Journal on Jun 22, 2026, where it first appeared in the News section. Add Men's Journal as a Preferred Source by clicking here.
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This story was originally published June 22, 2026 at 12:46 AM.