Southwest Airlines has made a few announcements that I think signal some more evolution in the future.  First was SWA VP Bob Jordan announcing that some time in 2013, Southwest will begin charging a cancel fee of a sort.

Currently, once you buy a ticket on Southwest, you essentially buy a “value” that should you miss or cancel your flight, you can use the credit towards a future flight (generally you must use this credit within 12 months).  Southwest plans to charge a “cancel fee” if you don’t call and cancel your flight.   This new service fee will be oriented towards SWA’s most restrictive fare categories.

In addition, Southwest is preparing to engage in a multi-stage codeshare rollout with Airtran.   Southwest will start slowly with a test beginning at the end of this year with several intermediate phases to follow and a complete roll out finished by April.  This is a big milestone for Southwest in its merger integration.

At first glance, one would be tempted to believe that these two items are fairly unrelated but they aren’t.  Southwest chose Amadeus software for its new reservations system and these two items signal that the software implementation has come quite a way.

It has to have or Southwest would be unable to implement the above steps.  I’m pretty impressed that Southwest has progressed this far in a new system implementation over the last year and I don’t think Southwest would be talking about these items if it hadn’t fairly solved most of its problems in these implementations.  Furthermore, I think it speaks well of choosing a tried and true system in Amadeus rather than asking someone to write all new software.

Airlines do better adjusting their business model to fit well tested software than they do creating all new systems.

Filed under: Airline News by ajax