Southwest Airlines and BookingBuilder Technologies next month intend to launch a bridge between the airline's Swabiz booking portal and online corporate booking tools, the companies announced today.
BookingBuilder and Southwest also renewed an agreement to "continue to provide travel agents with virtually seamless access to Southwest Airlines' online fares and Swabiz corporate booking site, via the BookingBuilder Desktop application."
BookingBuilder CEO Seth Perelman today said the companies, along with beta customer NuTravel, plan to demo the interface next week at the National Business Travel Association International Conference and Exhibition in Boston.
"While they have Swabiz, there are lots of companies that want to be booking through their self-booking tool," Perelman said. "It was a great extension of our partnership to now be able to provide the additional service. Just like BookingBuilder Desktop acts as a bridge between the GDS and the Southwest Web site, this product acts as a bridge between the corporate booking tools and Swabiz."
Perelman said bookings would take place on the Swabiz site, but "all the data from the corporate booking tool gets passed over to Swabiz, and the reservation is passed back to the online tool." Perelman said once the bridge is launched "by the end of August" the company will work on a case-by-case basis to integrate with corporate booking tools. "We're just going to do custom integration work with each booking tool—and really there's only a handful of them," Perelman said. "It's not a standard interface, since each booking tool is different. It makes the most sense to work with each one on a custom basis."
Southwest in 2004 for the first time authorized an outside entity—BookingBuilder—to interface with its Web site in an automated fashion, thereby opening unprecedented opportunity for corporate travel agents to book the low-cost carrier
(BTN, Oct. 18, 2004). The carrier has broadened its corporate distribution presence when in May it announced an agreement to offer its published fares and inventory—not including exclusive Web fares—to subscribers of the Galileo global distribution system
(BTN, May 21). The carrier also has a longstanding agreement with Sabre, giving the GDS limited access to its fare content.
Meanwhile, BookingBuilder last week announced an agreement with Worldspan to offer agency subscribers preferred transactional pricing and tighter integration. Amadeus today said it is finalizing a similar agreement with BookingBuilder.