Southwest Airlines has enhanced its meetings product with new automated features and the ability to book meetings travel through multiple channels, the carrier announced Tuesday at the IMEX trade show in Las Vegas. This is the first revamp of Southwest's meetings product in "many years," the carrier said.
Among the new features for meetings with 25 or more travelers are automated proposal requests, streamlined proposal management and tracking, self-service name change requests and name corrections up to 24 hours prior to departure, and the ability to book through the global distribution system, an API or direct-connect, or through Swabiz.
Users also can view meetings-specific reporting within Southwest Business Assist, its portal for corporate contracted customers.
Southwest's former meetings process was mostly manual, said Southwest VP and chief sales officer Dave Harvey. "What would take weeks now takes minutes," he said.
The carrier soft-launched the product a couple weeks ago and already has seen multiple users "go all the way through" on their own, without human intervention, Harvey said. "If they don’t need to, they don't have to interact with a human being. But, of course, if there is a need, there are ways for them to engage with our team."
Southwest sees three primary audiences for the upgraded product: travel managers and their teams, travel management companies and meeting planners. For the latter, "it's a whole new addressable market for us," Harvey said. The carrier will authenticate that the company is an authorized business, and there is no fee to use the product, he added.
As for using Southwest Business Assist to also manage meetings business, "It made sense," Harvey said. "We have thousands of organizations that use that daily, so it made sense to incorporate the Southwest Meetings product in that same environment. We have up to well over 100 capabilities within Southwest Business Assist and it's growing. We have an aggressive release cycle—some meetings, some base business features."