Southwest Airlines Offering Wireless For $5 per flight?

[Trinity524]

I just saw this on their website. Is this on all their flights? I'd pay $5 to keep myself busy for 2.5 hours!

 

[cricketgirl]

oh yay!!!

 

[SandrA9810]

I think it was 10$ on Airtran and usually free from one promotion or another. It was one of the perks that Airtran used, that I assume, Southwest has added to their line of "perks".

 

[Trinity524]

Yeah they said on their site that the $5 is an introductory price. I hope it's still that way in September!

 

[IDoDis]

Yep, they were offering it when I flew at the end of March. The kicker is it costs $5 for each leg of the trip. So if your plan lands and then takes off again, you have to pay another $5.00. If you have a 3 hour flight, but the plane is landing somewhere in 45 min, it might be best to wait until that leg of the flight has passed and then pay $5 for the remaining 2 hours of the flight. Otherwise it would cost you $10.00

 

[Trinity524]

Good point.

I have nonstop flights, so it's worth it to me.

 

[tigger51276]

OMG thank you sooo much for posting this. I am flying Southwest in 2 days and I'm sooooo excited to have internet on the plane. And $5 is a steal, heck I'd pay more than that to use my laptop on board.

 

[Zerosinthecloset]

OMG thank you sooo much for posting this. I am flying Southwest in 2 days and I'm sooooo excited to have internet on the plane. And $5 is a steal, heck I'd pay more than that to use my laptop on board.

Wifi is not available on all flights. If your flight is a wifi flight, you should get an email 24 hours before departure to notify you of it. The five dollar price is just a promotional price, probably until wifi is more widely available on their fleet.

 

[hopemax]

We had a WiFi enabled plane when we flew home from Seattle at Christmas. We happily paid the $5 for the novelty. But a word of warning, it was incredibly slow. We had been watching an episode of a tv show in the terminal, and we had 10 min left, so when we saw the wifi, we thought we would be able to finish it. It took 10 min to load the ABC player, and it buffered horribly. So we gave up on it, and just tried to surf. It would go in spurts where sometimes it would load a page quickly, but other times it would take minutes to load a page. On a short flight, you may not think the $5 was worth it.

 

[beccasmom]

It was available on our recent flight home, but not on the outbound flight. I received an e-mail the day before. I didn't use it though; I took the opportunity to nap instead! I think they expect to have their whole fleet equipped with it by the end of the year; I have not heard if the rate will increase.

 

[OhMari]

We had a WiFi enabled plane when we flew home from Seattle at Christmas. We happily paid the $5 for the novelty. But a word of warning, it was incredibly slow. We had been watching an episode of a tv show in the terminal, and we had 10 min left, so when we saw the wifi, we thought we would be able to finish it. It took 10 min to load the ABC player, and it buffered horribly. So we gave up on it, and just tried to surf. It would go in spurts where sometimes it would load a page quickly, but other times it would take minutes to load a page. On a short flight, you may not think the $5 was worth it.

AirTran had it for free from Christmas eve till Jan 2.
It kicked you out after 30 minutes and I had to reload, but it was ok.
I stayed on one or 2 websites.

 

[Fire14]

I had this option on my Columbus to Midway flight not worth it for maybe 45 min. I was hoping for it on our Midway to CA flight but I never got so lucky coming or going.

 

[stitchfan18]

We were offered free Facebook on an airtran flight in February, and I agree that the internet was super slow to load. Usually the air carrier website can be accessed for free, so you might play around a little on their website to see how the internet speed is before you pay for the service. I would have been annoyed if I would have payed for such slow internet, but since it was free I didn't mind so much.