Southwest Airlines continues to push its corporate sales channel forward. The company announced a multi-year agreement today with ATPCO to implement Express Contracts, a corporate contract automation tool.
Express Contracts streamlines the implementation of negotiated contracts between an airline and its corporate partners, enabling contracts to get to market in a matter of hours. This includes integration of ancillary offerings into the contract. As a result, customers and Southwest alike can realize the benefits of new agreements faster than legacy, manual processes permitted.
As we continue evolving our business travel distribution strategy, we’re always looking for new and innovative ways to improve efficiencies, remove friction, and continue our mission of making it easier to do business with Southwest Airlines.
– Rob Brown, Senior Director, distribution and services at Southwest Airlines
The companies also announced an agreement to integrate ATPCO’s RouteHappy solution, delivering consistent and visually appealing merchandising of Southwest content. ATPCO’s Routehappy content brings unique airline fares, products, and services to life with messaging, images, videos, and cabin tours that can be highly targeted by aircraft, route, time of day, and more.
Historically, airlines have used RouteHappy to help upsell passengers on premium cabin options. Southwest similarly hopes the visual messaging can help push passengers up the ladder of its four fare families. But the carrier faces challenges with that goal.
Unlike most other implementations, the seats and other inflight offerings do not change, regardless of which fare family a passenger purchases at Southwest. And visualizing differences in fare refundability is challenging.
Doug Sharpe, Head of Sales – Americas at ATPCO, added, “With simple calls to our Express Contracts and Routehappy APIs, ATPCO can fully automate the workflow for Southwest so it can bring improved speed to market, less manual processing, and increased efficiency along with the assurance its offers and brand are accurately represented to business travel customers on the sales channels of their choice.”
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