Southwest Airlines continues its effort to win back customers left distrustful by the airline’s epic holiday collapse that stranded millions of travelers across the country.
This time, CEO Bob Jordan’s apology was directed at a group he’s been trying to appeal to during the pandemic: business travelers.
During a town hall Monday, Jordan discussed the holiday fiasco with several other Southwest executives and outlined what the company is doing to make sure it doesn’t happen again. He said none of the airline’s priorities are “revolutionary” but are aimed at improving the flying experience.
“We are still restoring our network from before the pandemic,” Jordan said. “It’s all about adding features that we know you and your customers want. Things like power ports on the plane, bigger containers, extra functionality in the app.”
Larger containers mean more places for bags on board, fewer checked baggage at the gate, less time on the ground and more time in the air, said Ryan Green, Southwest’s executive vice president and chief commercial officer.
The company will add ports on all of its new planes, a must-have for business travelers, and will transition to USB-A and USB-C ports on its Boeing 737 Max planes, Green said.
“Frankly, in the last few years we haven’t had the product that we want or need, so we’re making the investment to upgrade the hardware,” Green said. “We have broken through about half of the existing fleet here. We will finish the rest of the existing fleet between now and the summer.”
Months before the holiday crash, Southwest launched a referral program for small and medium-sized businesses, giving out 25,000 reward points per business for referring other businesses to its managed travel system. The operator used the show as a way to capture a hard-to-reach audience, just as it was emerging from the economic downturn of the pandemic.
In 2021, Southwest entered into a distribution agreement with Southlake-based Saber Corp. where thousands of business travel planners can see Southwest’s routes on their screens when booking employee travel instead of having to compare with Southwest. com.
As for doing things right with vacation travelers, Green said the company returned most bags to customers within a week and handled about 93% of refund requests from travelers who had to book hotel rooms. , rent cars or buy tickets on competing airlines.
