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Boston Herald
Boston Herald
11 Mar 2025
Boston Herald Wire Services


NextImg:Ticker: Checked bags no longer free on Southwest; Job openings rise in January

Southwest Airlines will begin charging customers a fee to check bags, abandoning a decades-long practice that executives had described last fall as key to differentiating the budget carrier from its rivals.

Southwest, which built years of advertising campaigns around its policy of letting passengers check up to two bags for free, said Tuesday that people who haven’t either reached the upper tiers of its Rapid Rewards loyalty program, bought a business class ticket or hold the airline’s credit card will have to pay for checked bags.

The airline did not outline the fee schedule but said the new policy would start with flights booked on May 28.

“We have tremendous opportunity to meet current and future customer needs, attract new customer segments we don’t compete for today, and return to the levels of profitability that both we and our shareholders expect,” CEO Bob Jordan said in a statement.

U.S. job openings rose at the start of the year, another sign the job market was solid when President Donald Trump returned to the White House.

U.S. employers posted 7.7 million vacancies in January, the Labor Department reported Tuesday, up from 7.5 million. The outlook for the labor market is murky as Trump wages a trade war with foreign countries, purges federal workers and threatens to deport millions of immigrants.

Layoffs fell slightly in January, and the number of Americans quitting their jobs rose.

The Labor Department’s Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey showed that openings rose in real estate, healthcare, manufacturing and construction firms.  The fallout from the administration’s purge of federal workers is not expected to show up in labor market data at least until the February numbers come out.