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> How could not having all that free advertising from flight search engines possibly be a good thing for Southwest? It's not 'free'. See this quora answer for
by illnewsthat 10y ago
> How could not having all that free advertising from flight search engines possibly be a good thing for Southwest?
It's not 'free'. See this quora answer for more: (https://www.quora.com/Why-does-Southwest-choose-not-to-offer-their-fares-on-3rd-party-flight-aggregators/answer/Adam-Kuebler https://www.quora.com/Why-does-Southwest-choose-not-to-offer...)
Short Answer: It costs money to be there and they can control the variables and environment better on their website.
Long Answer: It dates back to Southwest's routes in competing with the car for travel. In order to be price competitive, they did not want to pay travel agents a 10% commission. (This was the 1970s) So they sold tickets by the phone, at the airport, or at their office, but always direct.
As computers evolved, travel agents began connecting to an airlines fares by computer, rather than books and a phone. Airlines began developing proprietary systems for managing ticket sales, allowing other airlines to be in their systems for a fee. The biggest were Apollo (United) and Sabre (American). Southwest still refused to pay the distribution costs of the tickets.
When the internet became more broadly available to consumers, Southwest jumped on the opportunity, becoming the first major airline to sell tickets online. Other airline followed and soon after, 3rd party sites came to be, using the GDS' (Global Distribution Systems) like Sabre and Apollo to display all of the flights and fares. Acting like modern day travel agents, and putting many travel agents out of business.
Today, while Southwest has become a much larger airline, it still does not want to pay the GDS' for access to their systems. However, today Southwest has a much stronger brand which can drive more people to their website. And by having the website as the primary channel of distribution, they can control a lot of things that they could not within the confines of a GDS.
It has been debated whether the GDS' are really necessary anymore as middlemen. And besides Southwest, other airlines are trying to bring more people to their controlled distribution channel. In the past few days, Delta and American have removed their flight from several 3rd party websites.
- cbr 10y agoI'd be very surprised if Google Flights wanted Southwest to pay for inclusion. It already lists Southwest flights with a note "Prices are not available for: Southwest. Flights with unknown prices are at the end of the list." Instead it really sounds like it's Southwest not wanting it to be easy for people to comparison shop. (Disclaimer: I work for Google, on an unrelated project.)
- Quinner 10y agoGoogle hooks into the systems that want Southwest to pay, it's not directly making that decision.
- cbr 10y agoEven then, though, I'd still be very surprised if Google would respond to an offer of seat availability data from Southwest with "sorry, we won't let people search it unless you pay us".
- geverett 10y agoGoogle works with a few airlines that don't pay them anything. However, Southwest (probably rightly) thinks that if people get used to finding Southwest fares on Google, they'll visit Southwest.com less frequently, increasing Southwest's reliance on Google in the long term. I'm nearly certain Southwest has sent a specific cease and desist to Google to NOT include its fares in results.
- cbr 10y agoYes, Southwest asking Google not to include their fares in results seems likely to me. (This thread started with me arguing that "it costs money to be there" was not the reason Southwest flight prices aren't in Google.)
- massysett 10y agoIsn't Google sending customers directly to airline websites to book? So the way this is working is: Google, Hipmunk, etc. use GDS for queries, and then send customer to airline to book? Does GDS have any ability to sell tickets? Has Google tried to scrape data directly from Southwest website and Southwest won't let them? Or is it just that Southwest will not provide APIs to make it easy for Google to pull the data?