Southwest Expands Meetings Product Capabilities, Launches TravelTrack

Southwest Airlines recently expanded the capabilities of its meetings product, Southwest VP and chief sales officer Dave Harvey confirmed earlier in April. 

Functionality now enables users to request event proposals with end-to-end automation, unlimited name changes, new bulk event requests with up to 50 meetings at once, faster fare filings, detailed event reporting and additional custom offers, according to Southwest.

Event reporting now includes a user's history, so they can see all their previously executed and completed contracts "at their fingertips," Harvey said. "A lot of these big events happen every year. Now they can kind of pick up where they left off. How successful was that event? Did they get the utilization out of the meeting agreement that they expected for Southwest? It's one more way they're not starting from scratch."

The data goes back to October 2023, when the meetings product was launched, according to Southwest. 

For the custom offers, the tool looks at what a customer's transient agreement is versus the dynamic offer engine, Harvey said. "We can actually put the best of both worlds in front of them to see what makes sense to give them the best offer," he added.

Further, after the release of the meetings product last fall, if a customer needed to get assistance from the service team or their account manager, "it would kind of punch out and you'd go back to manual mode," Harvey said. "Now, we've got the next level of capability where you can adjust the proposal digitally and stay in the workflow."

Harvey added that the carrier has a high rate of proposals that go straight through without any edits or adjustments. 

The product also allows for what Harvey called a "deep link." No matter what the channel the customer is using, whether the global distribution system or an API, a meeting planner or corporate travel manager can distribute a booking link to all their travelers. "It makes it so much easier for the travelers to just click on the link," Harvey said. 

TravelTrack

Southwest also in April launched a new product named TravelTrack. At the time of the joint conference sponsored by ATPCO and Airline Reporting Corp. in mid-April, when Harvey spoke with BTN, the carrier was doing some "final validations" with travel management companies and a booking tool, Harvey said. 

What is it? 

"This is going to be the best-in-class product for duty of care," Harvey said. Essentially, it is capturing data when a corporate traveler makes a change to their itinerary that differs from their channel of booking, including when they make the booking in an online booking tool but then change it, say, via the Southwest website or app. The company used to lose visibility of that traveler.

TravelTrack can capture the change data and send messages to the TMC in "near real time," Harvey said. "It's a tech lift for predominantly the TMC, but once the TMC has the capability, they have hundreds of accounts that they can service. A lot of [travel] buyers and lot of TMCs wanted better, real-time data to understand where their travelers are in the journey, and that was really the inspiration."

United Airlines in October 2023 also announced a solution to this issue of losing visibility on travelers who make changes on airline-direct platforms after using an OBT for the initial booking.