I do believe this is true. I initially wasn't going on a cruise this Feb. with family out of Canaveral, so when I purchased the same flight I was an anytime fare rather than wanna get away. Even though everyone purchased EBCI my boarding position was higher even though I purchased later.
Does your DH have A-List or A-List Preferred status? If so, he was assigned a boarding position before any EBCI passenger. At 36 hours out, SW's system assigns boarding positions to: Business Select (in A1-A15), and then starting at A16: A-List Preferred, then A-List, then passengers with an Anytime fare ticket plus EBCI, and finally, passengers with a Wanna Get Away fare plus EBCI. If there were any connecting passengers with EBCI on your flight, they received their boarding passes earlier in the day than you and would be ahead of the non-Business Select passengers on your flight. If you had flown on a weekday, there could have been enough A-Listers and Anytime fare passengers with EBCI on your flight, pushing you back into the B group. But given it was a Saturday, I'm surprised you ended up that far behind your DH.
Southwest doesn't have a policy for or against seat saving. It is simply open seating. It is true however that any seat no matter the number may be occupied by any passenger.
mmkk..but that's not what you nor I was saying.
I did a 630 am departure out of orlando... once. Never again. We was at pool till close to midnight, packed till 1230, slept till 4, returned rental car and made flight. Oh yea it was me and my 7 year old. She was doing navigation back to airport from Disney at 415 am... like I said never again... leave orlando this trip at 730 pm... as far as our flight to orlando I think its super early but hey I can find our airport from our house easily.This is SUPER interesting to hear!! We have our SW flights to WDW on June 8 and then home on June 14th - we booked them free using points for me and our 2 teenagers and then DH is my free companion pass. I bought EBCI for all 4 flights when we booked the flights back in December. We've never gotten basically 4 free flights before so it will be interesting to see what our seats are. Our outbound flights to MCO leave at 6:15am so maybe no one else will be awake yet!
I was on a SW flight many years ago. It was right after SW started the new style of boarding, and I was in the A group, about A20 or so. I boarded, sat down in the third row, window. I watched as a large group boarded....about 8-10 people. They were obviously traveling together. They plopped down in pairs....window and aisle seats. Took 4 or 5 rows, all in the front. People boarded, looked at those empty seats...and were told 'Sorry, this seat is saved' and they would shrug and move on. Well, as the C group boarded, the flight attendant announced that it was going to be a pretty full flight, so if you see an empty seat, sit in it. Man, you never saw people scurry so fast! That family that had 'saved' all those middle seats were now trying to move those empty seats so they didn't have strangers sitting in the middle seats!! I know we all love having an empty middle seat next to us, but that just doesn't happen all that often now that they are flying fewer planes!! Imagine how thrilled some in the late C group were to find seats together, in the front of the plane!!!
