Southwest Airlines now is mulling what to do about corporate travel distributors that are screen-scraping fares and inventory off its Web site without permission.
Unlike global distribution system participation, there is no charge to Southwest for such access, but the airline is weighing whether this poses competition to its site and its Swabiz booking tool.
For corporate buyers, accessing Southwest and other suppliers that decline to participate in all GDSs is more important than ever at a time when their departments' integrity is questioned by corporate travelers and executives who think they can get better fares elsewhere. Moreover, new policies by the major airlines are driving corporations to JetBlue, Southwest and other low-cost carriers. Even legacy carriers admit that the Southwest way is on a collision course with domestic dominance.
"We are aware of screen-scraping occurring," said Rob Brown, a Southwest regional director responsible for corporate products. "It's something that we're looking into and we haven't yet decided how we are going to address it."
Southwest has been known to turn off distributors in order to control its own inventory. Last year, it stopped filing fares with the Airline Tariff Publishing Co. to cut off access by Orbitz
(BTN, July 16, 2001). Years ago, it shunned most GDSs.
The carrier did not name any current offenders, but one of them is New York-based FareChase, which provides Web fares to Outtask's Cliqbook product, Amadeus' E-Travel and others. While FareChase now gets inventory from southwest.com, a spokesperson last week said FareChase did not have an agreement with the carrier, but they are negotiating.
Atlanta-based AgentWare, whose Web-fare search tool is being implemented by Sabre's Menlo Park, Calif.-based GetThere subsidiary, said it does not scrape Southwest's site pending discussions with the carrier, according to an AgentWare spokesperson. A spokesperson for SideStep, another search tool, said it has an agreement with Southwest that gives it access. "We do not search sites owned by airlines that don't want to work with us," he said.
Other travel suppliers face similar issues.
"We're comfortable with people doing that as long as there are some standard protocols," said JetBlue vice president of sales and distribution Tim Claydon. "For example, we want a relationship and an understanding and an agreement with these firms. We don't want just anyone to grab information off our site, particularly if we don't know they are being professional."
"We allow certain engines access to our site," according to Bill Howard, AirTran director of sales, based in Atlanta. "Some we do, some we don't. A lot of it has to do with the terms the online site requires."
The issue of controlling and protecting one's inventory online comes up for hotels as well.
"It used to be that you had phones, GDSs and that was it," said Mike Kirstner, vice president and CIO at Best Western International. "Now you go online and you have to worry about where and how we are represented. Are people marking us up in a merchant model? We've been working on a comprehensive electronic distribution strategy to answer questions like, 'Is this someone we should do business with or is it an opportunity we'll let pass?' "
Best Western's Kirstner said it is possible for vendors to close off their inventory, but that's a last resort. "You start out trying to manage the relationship, but in some cases they're pulling inventory from intermediaries, so you have to track it back to the source," he said. "You may need the cooperation of your partners too, and they may have difficulty shutting off a given stream of water."
Access to such streams by corporate buyers has become more important as they increase their use of suppliers not in the GDSs.
"The low-cost airlines are putting pressure on the network carriers to ensure they are providing the best macro value to corporate clients," said Eric Henderson, Rosenbluth International director of North America supplier relations. "And the past 18 months have forced to the front burner this issue of access to and the utility of low-cost carriers within travel management programs."
Consultant Norm Rose of Travel Tech Consulting in Belmont, Calif., distinguished access to non-GDS participants from access to Web-only fares. "We're moving toward a different set of suppliers entering the corporate market—the new corporate carriers—for which you need basic access as well as distressed inventory. I think all the self-booking suppliers understand the difference and know they need to go after both."
Bob Lichtman, Santa Clara, Calif.-based consultant with The Corporate Solutions Group, said tools that use Web-fare searching, which he called aggregators, are the answer to what he said is still a major issue: Southwest's lack of presence in booking systems not backed by Sabre.
He called Southwest's Swabiz business booking site, which is more than two years old, a "patch."
"I still hear frustration with it," he said. "It doesn't meet the requirements of the online booking tool because it's not one-stop shopping. It's an absurd way of doing business."
Lichtman preferred the integration offered by such products as Alexandria, Va.-based Outtask's Cliqbook. An Outtask spokesperson said the system weaves Southwest segments into a super PNR and that corporate clients can turn it off if they want.
While they acknowledged using Swabiz is less than seamless, however, many Southwest customers stopped short of Lichtman's view. Some, in fact, believe the following statement—heard multiple times at the recent National Business Travel Association convention—is more absurd: "We can't book Southwest because they're not in our GDS."
Buyers, for the most part, have dropped objections to the distribution philosophy that keeps Southwest out of all GDSs but Sabre
(BTN, Nov. 15, 1999) and instead have succumbed to the low fares and loyalty Southwest generates by shoehorning Swabiz into their programs.
One of the most attractive aspects of Swabiz for corporate clients is that it's free. That fact has some buyers using it even though their booking systems connect with Sabre, which not only offers bookings on Southwest, but also provides it with other products, including a reservation system.
"A lot of organizations use Sabre specifically because they are big Southwest users," Lichtman said. "But for others, there are cost issues. I know of one buyer who had Southwest available in her online booking tool, which was connected to Sabre, but she chose to include Swabiz to save a few bucks."
Cindy Heston, manager of worldwide corporate travel at Thomson Multimedia in Indianapolis, said she went so far as to alter her company's travel policy to accommodate Swabiz.
"We have a travel page on our intranet, which is where we have the login for ResAssist," said Heston, referring to the corporate self-booking tool provided by Atlanta-based TRX.
"On that page, we also have a Southwest icon and it says, 'Click here to book Southwest.' Our policy was redefined for Southwest. Before, we required that all travelers use ResAssist or the agency, but now we say travelers can click that link."
Though she admitted it offers little in the way of integration, Heston called Swabiz "a good solution," noting that before it was available, agents booked Southwest by telephone. "That was one of the most expensive calls for the most economical trip. The cost to process it was sometimes 50 percent of the fare, so when Swabiz came out we decided to adjust our policy accordingly."
Swabiz is about as integrated as it can get at San Antonio-based telecommuncations firm SBC, which said it customized its GetThere travel home page to automatically enter SBC's Swabiz identification number so that travelers do not need to remember that number or enter it themselves.
According to Southwest's Brown, Swabiz continues to double its revenue and enrollments continue to grow. "It's far exceeded our two-year goals and I can safely say I don't foresee it being shut down. The sky's the limit."