Southwest Airlines and Expedia Corporate Travel recently enabled ECT corporate customers to interface with the carrier's Swabiz corporate portal. Their cooperation follows a similar deal forged last year between Southwest and BookingBuilder Technologies
(BTN, Oct. 18, 2004).Southwest corporate sales director Rob Brown said the new arrangement "allows ECT licensees to link to Swabiz from the ECT desktop." To book a Southwest flight, users previously were required to use Swabiz outside the ECT environment or call ECT customer service for manual processing.
"As a customer searches as they usually would, the system will now show a link to Swabiz in those cities Southwest serves," said ECT marketing manager Mitch Robinson. Integrated reporting capabilities between Swabiz and ECT for travel managers still are in the works.
The bridge already built by BookingBuilder to Swabiz is used by travel agents through global distribution systems other than Sabre—Southwest's only current GDS affiliation—and transfers passenger name record and traveler profile information between Southwest's and the agency's systems.
Brown said Southwest "is not necessarily" exploring similar arrangements with other corporate travel reservations platforms, "but we are always listening. The main thing is to make certain this type of thing falls in line with our distribution strategy."
As such, the ECT arrangement does not extend to Expedia's leisure-oriented online reservations outlet. "This really shows that suppliers understand we're a full corporate travel agency independent of our sister leisure site," Robinson said.
Meanwhile, Southwest CEO Gary Kelly at an investor's conference last week said the carrier would "stay the course" in its strategy to "exclusively distribute our product through southwest.com," on which the Swabiz portal resides. Southwest.com accounts for 65 percent of all Southwest tickets. Kelly also said "we will continue to evaluate other global distribution systems to see if there is an opportunity for Southwest."
Southwest also recently added a fifth member to its national sales team, which launched two years ago to focus on enrolling corporations in the Swabiz program
(BTNonline, March 30). Brown cited continued Swabiz growth, including a 47 percent increase in year-over-year first-quarter bookings and a 53 percent jump in enrollments. He also said Southwest added a dedicated Swabiz help desk "to answer questions and assist travel managers in running reports."
For its part, ECT since late April established new deals with Alitalia, Virgin Atlantic and rental car firms Hertz and Enterprise. "If customers have a negotiated corporate rate, it'll show up in their search," Robinson explained. "If not, they have access to a full selection of ECT negotiated rates."
Competing online-originating agencies—Cendant's Travelport/Orbitz for Business and Sabre's Travelocity Business—in the past year established supplier arrangements with domestic low-cost and international carriers
(BTNonline, April 8), though neither has secured cooperation from Southwest.