1.23.2008

Southwest Airlines to Join the Mile Wi-Fi Club - Will They Reach Out to Bloggers?

I saw today on Engadget that Southwest Airlines has plans to launch in-flight Wi-Fi beginning this summer (official news release here.) The initial run on Wi-Fi-outfitted planes may be limited to four at first but they apparently plan to roll this out across the board in the future. They're aiming to provide the best in-flight Wi-Fi available according to Dave Ridley, Southwest's Senior Vice President of Marketing: "We intend to deliver the highest bandwidth available to commercial airlines in the United States." There has been no word as to whether the service will be free on the flights.

This is pretty exciting for those of us who travel with laptops, iPhones, or any other Wi-Fi enabled device. When Southwest is ready to launch this service I can't help but wonder if they'll reach out to bloggers to spread the word. It would make quite a statement if they filled the inaugural Wi-Fi flight with bloggers, all of whom would be live-blogging the flight. That would likely make news itself, not to mention all the blog posts from those on the flight and residual blog posts that would follow. This seems like a great opportunity for a company that has a reputation for doing things a little different from everybody else. Heck, they could even bring along their own bloggers.

One request if Southwest happens to see this...if you do the blogger flight, leave the middle seats open. Bloggers like their space. Bonus request: can I come?

Perhaps once this rolls out it will be a good reason for business travelers to fly rather than drive when they have the option. They could actually be productive on the flight rather than losing that time in the air. Why fly? Wi-Fi.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

cool idea Bill. I passed it along.
Brian

Bill Seaver said...

Thanks Brian. I hope you guys do it. If you need help pulling a list of bloggers together just let me know.