Southwest Business VP Harvey discusses:
- Features available upon the portal's launch and future plans
- Southwest's plans for sustainability reporting
- The status of the new Wanna Get Away Plus fare
Southwest Airlines is set to launch on Aug. 24 its Southwest Business Assist corporate travel portal, which will offer several self-service features for corporate customers. Dave Harvey, the carrier’s VP of Southwest Business, this week spoke to BTN senior editor Donna M. Airoldi at the Global Business Travel Association convention in San Diego to share more details on the tool and what’s in store for future releases. Edited excerpts follow.
BTN: What will be the biggest changes for corporate customers as they start to use the portal?
Dave Harvey: The current process is very manual. It’s a lot of picking up the phone, email—"Can you run this report? Can you send that quarterly business review? Can you pull unused funds? Duty of care?" Those are very important and critical to the relationship and program, but they are not high-value interactions. They’re more administrative, back-office in nature. So, [the portal] is not only a huge win for the business community and our customers but also a huge item for our sales team. It gives the power to the travel manager, so when they engage with our account team, it’s much more strategic.
[Travel buyers] told us for years we needed this platform. After getting the [global distribution systems] turned on, this was the next biggest thing we had to bring to market. A lot of these global programs have thousands of travelers who may book Southwest in different ways—through Swabiz, through our direct connect, through the GDS. This will be a single source of truth. No matter what channel is used, you can see that entire book of business with Southwest.
BTN: What did you learn from beta-testing the tool?
Harvey: We have three influencer boards. One is dedicated to the [travel management company] community, one is for large buyers on the corporate side, and then we have higher education business. About 60 accounts got access to a beta release in May with the sole intention of getting that real-time feedback. They loved it and wanted more capability faster. They helped us with the prioritization of what will launch [Aug. 24], and then we are planning another smaller release this fall and another major release in the first quarter. We’ll keep adding the bells and whistles for capability.
There were some reports and dashboards where they said, "I really need this data element" or "I need it organized this way." I call it fine-tuning to help the navigation and usability of the tool. One thing that is extremely satisfying is that we will be the first of the airline suppliers to launch on Salesforce Experience Cloud. We got feedback that it is the most intuitive and, from usability, the best tool in the marketplace even for our beta release.
BTN: Sustainability was one of those features moved up for the initial release.
Harvey: There’s an emerging demand for sustainability and better understanding the carbon footprint. It wasn’t in the original plan to go live next Wednesday, but we were able to pull forward some of that capability so you can make a request and get it fulfilled through the portal to get your measurement and your sustainability reporting.
BTN: So you’re automating the request, not the immediate delivery of the report?
Harvey: It will make it much easier for you to make
that request and for us to fulfill it. You won’t have to go to the account
manager and ask, ‘Did you see my note? When are you going to turn this for me?’
We have service-level agreements where we want to turn this very quickly. Think
of it almost as a clearinghouse for all those requests. … We can turn it in a
day or two.
[Editor's Note: Since Harvey spoke with BTN, Southwest shared that not only
will users be able to request sustainability reports through the portal, but
that they also will be automated for the release on Aug. 24.]
The portal will describe all the dashboards, performance,
where you are tied to your contractual agreements. It’s dynamic. You can see in
real time all your history and all your flying, and [whether you are] on track
or off track. There is a ton of education and communication in our portal. It's
standard that we have a quarterly business review with all our accounts. Today,
that’s a PowerPoint, and I email it over to you. Maybe you save it or maybe you
don’t. When we sign a contract, we have a travel agreement. Maybe you save it,
maybe you don’t. Now you have it all right there in the portal. With this
release there is still some manual fulfillment. Future releases will be much
more automated and enable the user to have it right there on demand.
[Editor's Note: According to Southwest, items that will be automated on
Aug. 24 in addition to the sustainability report include A-list upgrades, UATP
enrollment and UATP flight credit conversions. Future releases are slated to
include status matches and refund requests, though the company is working to
automate this function.]
BTN: You previously noted that duty-of-care reporting would be automated in a future release, as well as eligible flight credits.
Harvey: In a future release is the management of taking control of transferability. [New fare] Wanna Get Away Plus is doing really well. It’s very business-friendly. And travel credits don’t expire now. … The portal will give you the visibility to all of those transactions and better management when you need to get those credits back, when you need to actually do the transfer.
BTN: Are you seeing the Wanna Get Away Plus fare being booked through Southwest Business? What portion of bookings is it so far?
Harvey: We don’t share that breakdown, [but] we’re getting strong adoption. It’s a new product so there are a lot of conversations with the travel managers. On the other side, with a lot of our distribution and channel partners, the online booking tools, you want to make sure it’s displaying the right way and you’ve taken out all that friction. Then you have the management piece we talked about. … It’s not just about transferability, it’s also the same-day-confirm change, and same-day standby. The same-day-confirm change is huge, especially in markets like Texas and California where we’re bringing back that short-haul.
BTN: The Early-Bird Check-in is an option when booking on both Travelport and Amadeus. When will it be available on Sabre?
Harvey: The work is essentially done. We’re finishing up the testing, and then we anticipate releasing it by the end of September.
BTN: The release announcement also noted a partnership with ATPCO’s Express Contracts and Routehappy services. How will those change the customer experience?
Harvey: [For Express Contracts], think of it as the customer relationship management side of our business. Once we actually complete a contract with a buyer, typically it’s another very manual process, and we are making it more streamlined and automated. Sometimes it could take a week or two before we could start filing fares with the discounts associated with them. Now, that can literally be done in a matter of minutes. It’s an integration between our team and our revenue management team, the tariffs teams that do all the fare filings and partnership with us. We could cut a deal and get your fares loaded today.
On Routehappy, there are other rich-content clearinghouse providers, but [it] is becoming the de facto standard. If you think about the imagery, pictures of our four products, describing all the attributes and benefits that come with Wanna Get Away, Wanna Get Away Plus, Anytime and Business Select, and there are a lot of online booking tools as well as GDSs that source all that content from Routehappy. We had some workarounds to get them that content, now we’ll be industry standard. If we ever make changes, we can get it loaded in Routehappy and everybody can consume it from there.
There are still a lot of travel advisors, TMCs, even travel teams that have not done a lot of flying on Southwest, so they are not as educated on our product. You really want to display and showcase your products in a rich way, and this will be a great way to get them up to speed quickly.