Southwest Airlines and Sabre Corp. have agreed to a new full-participation distribution agreement, which they plan to implement sometime later this year.
The agreement, announced Dec. 31, provides the same content and capabilities as the agreements reached with Travelport and Amadeus in 2019, including full participation with ARC ticketing and settlement, according to Southwest Business VP Dave Harvey. It creates parity across all of Southwest's global distribution system partners, with access to 90 percent of its overall content and full content within two weeks of booking, he said.
Content will include "richer capabilities to travel buyers," such as more accurate schedules and inventory, last seat availability, real-time booking and the ability to modify bookings within Sabre, according to Sabre and Southwest.
The announcement comes after more than two years of discussions that seemed to have reached an impasse. A few weeks prior, Harvey had said that Southwest still did not see "a path forward in the short term" with Sabre for enhanced GDS participation.
Southwest also had planned at the end of 2020 to end the bare-bones "basic booking request" model through which it had worked with Sabre for decades. Southwest's content now has been reinstated in that model, which will continue to be in place for buyers and travel management companies until Sabre and Southwest move to the full-participation model, Harvey said.
"We recognize the importance of having Southwest content in our marketplace, and by reaching this mutually beneficial agreement before year-end, we will continue to deliver uninterrupted access for our customers," Sabre Travel Solutions chief commercial officer Roshan Mendis said in a statement.
Harvey said Southwest does not yet have an estimation of when the new content agreement would go live, as implementation teams are beginning planning this week. Southwest content went live in Travelport's Apollo and Worldspan GDSs last May, followed by Galileo in July and Amadeus in October.