It’s been nearly four years since Southwest Airlines completed its first full-participation integration with a GDS. Senior editor Robert Silk sat down with Southwest chief sales officer Dave Harvey at the recent Elevate and Travel Connect conference hosted by ARC and ATPCO to discuss the carrier’s inroads in the corporate market.
Dave Harvey
Q: What can you tell me about your corporate customer growth?
A: We’re gaining thousands and thousands of new accounts per year and shifting a lot of industry share. And the revenue has grown very nicely. It’s a tail wind for the company.
Q: Where is that share coming from?
A: Well, it’s kind of across the board. Just being easier to work with and having industry-standard solutions and our point-to-point network. And winning on flexibility goes miles in this space. We shifted about three points of industry share last year.
Q: Is Southwest considering NDC?
A: We’re monitoring. If you think about our product, it’s all-in value. Even Wanna Get Away, our lowest fare product, is full of flexibility. It’s not a basic economy product where it’s stripped down. So, when you hear other players talk about the next level of retailing or personalization — which candidly has not manifested so far — we don’t need it for that from a product standpoint.
We do need to go to NDC more from a technical capability, because more and more partners want to direct connect to us. If you were a new booking tool, or you’re a new agency that wanted to direct connect, you would be more inclined to do so if it was on the NDC spec versus writing to an older spec that we’re going to have to port over to the new NDC schema.
Q: How is Southwest using AI?
A: Right now we’re using it as an enabler more for service. But that enabling also helps drive productivity and efficiency, so there is some cost savings, as well. In the past month we launched our customer assist. It’s kind of a help center; people have a lot of servicing requests that would have gone to a human at a contact center, and they’re solving it completely with the AI transaction back and forth. We’re getting great customer satisfaction results from that, but we’re trying to do it in a way that enhances service and frees up our people to deliver true hospitality.
There’s also use cases in tech ops. Think about how much time a mechanic has to spend going through manuals validating information. That’s a highly skilled worker spending time doing that, where if you let AI as an assistant kind of cut to the chase and tell them what they need to go do next, that’s a productivity gain. So I think on the commercial side it will ultimately help drive inspiration and sales. There’s just a lot of avenues that we can take it.
Q: Southwest Business is launching a solution called Travel Track in the next couple weeks. What is it?
A: There’s really not a good data solution out there that in real time lets the TMC and the travel manager know where their travelers are at all times. Clearly you can see a booking today, but a lot of times especially business travelers change the itinerary. Often they are doing it through our direct channels, but they may have booked through Concur on a GDS. When they make that change, the travel manager and the TMC lose visibility in real time. It may get picked up at night, it may get picked up a couple days later, but that’s not duty of care when you don’t know where your travelers are. Travel Track is event based. We’re going to be sending updates. When did the traveler check in? When did they board? All of that data is being pumped to the TMC. We are not aware of anyone else who has this in the marketplace.
