Changes Coming Soon to southwest.com

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Changes Coming Soon to southwest.com

Tue, 08/04/2009 - 08:53 — Ashley Rogers

In the coming weeks and months, you’ll begin to see changes on the Southwest Airlines web site, southwest.com. These are tweaks that will help make purchasing easier for Customers. While a majority of the work is behind-the-scenes, you will see a few new user-friendly features when booking a flight.

We will be rolling these changes out slowly and in phases, so not every Customer’s computer will be directed to the new pages at the same time. We hope to be fully transitioned in September, and we’ll monitor the transition closely to make sure it goes as smoothly as possible. We don’t want anything coming between you and your next Southwest Airlines flight!

As Customers are directed to the new booking area, they will experience an updated user-friendly design. Plus, on direct flights (with stops but no change of planes), we will now show you the city location where your aircraft stops, a highly requested feature! Once a ticket is purchased, Customers will be able to click a button to have their travel itinerary and confirmation number added to their Microsoft Outlook calendar, for one less email to keep track of. Also, Customers will be given immediate access to information about their destination such as weather forecasts, airport information, and fun things to do in that city. These are just a few of the changes coming soon to southwest.com.

Stay tuned, and we hope you enjoy the upgrades! In the meantime, here are some before and after screen shots.

Current confirmation page:

New confirmation page:

Current select flight page:

New select flight page:

iCal and Outlook Feature

Itinerary details:

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Comments

If you can, please add an option for Mac users to add to iCal as well. :-)

Jason Edwards — Tue, 08/04/2009 - 09:24

I agree - we Mac users want to be able to go right into iCal. Thanks!

Scott — Tue, 08/04/2009 - 11:20

Google Calendar anyone? Can't make out whether that's already an option from the down-res'd screenshots, but that'd be useful for those of us in the Googleverse.

Looking forward to the new flight selection screen; will make day-to-day comparisons a lot quicker, a la what Frontier Airlines now has.

Ian L — Tue, 08/04/2009 - 11:23

Awesome, as always.

Clint Davis, Washington, DC — Tue, 08/04/2009 - 11:25

Yes...an option for ICal for us Mac users would be great!

Tony Fitzpatrick — Tue, 08/04/2009 - 11:28

Outlook? How about some iCal love?

hgdf — Tue, 08/04/2009 - 11:31

I second the request for iCal option for Mac users! :)

lena — Tue, 08/04/2009 - 11:32

Don't forget Google calendar! That would be tops too!

Stacy Cervantes — Tue, 08/04/2009 - 11:34

Agreed on the Mac friendly option, but liking the new layout!

Rachel — Tue, 08/04/2009 - 11:40

While these changes sound great, Southwest is in desperate need of a "contact us" that allows the customer to send an email. I think not providing that option is a blemish for an otherwise communications-savvy organization.

Anonymous — Tue, 08/04/2009 - 11:40

I want to try the feature to download to Outlook with some tix that I already bought.

Where's that on the website? I looked at existing reservations, but its not there.

Jason — Tue, 08/04/2009 - 12:01

lookin good. make sure you do plenty of usability testing ;-)

Chops — Tue, 08/04/2009 - 12:02

Nice clean lines, and the important information being larger and up-front, rather than buried within the forms. Good work!

I second @Jason Edwards' request for an iCal connection.

Smitty — Tue, 08/04/2009 - 12:15

Will these web changes effect online check-in? I'm flying in September and want to make sure I know what I'm doing.

whitney — Tue, 08/04/2009 - 12:17

Great news... However, these screen-shots are terrible. Any chance you guys could post high-resolution images.

Nick Florez — Tue, 08/04/2009 - 12:34

Yay for the new select flight page!

Reeze — Tue, 08/04/2009 - 12:48

Thanks for all the comments. See my comment below for the iCal and Google calendar suggestions.

Anonymous at 11:40 Where have you been? Go to our contact page at southwest.com and you will see an e-mail option.

Jason, as Ashley mentions, the new updated pages are rolling out slowly. Not everyone has them yet, but be patient.

Whitney, no it won't affect online checkin, although our recent Kiosk enhancements give you more checkin and upgrade options.

Brian Lusk — Tue, 08/04/2009 - 12:54

Another voice for iCal - would be a great feature for those of us who like to have our flight information transit easily to iPhone.

RKArena — Tue, 08/04/2009 - 12:56

Good news for those of you wanting iCal,
Kelly, the Manager of our Online Customer Experience group just sent me this e-mail:

"iCal is an option, we just called out the Outlook part in the wording b/c it's so highly requested...the image shows that you have the option for both. :-)" [I have added a detail of the iCal option.]

and speaking of images, Nick. I am sorry about the quality of the screen shots. The problem is with the formating of the blog. The maximum width of any photo is 500 pixels, and that is what I had to reduce the screen shots to. The space is just too small to show everything. But let me work on one idea to see if it will work.

Brian Lusk — Tue, 08/04/2009 - 13:09

One of the changes I would like to see is..On the Flight Selection page you have all the flights listed some are Non-stop some say (for example) DEN/1 or 1 or 2. I know this means you have a connection or a stop in route to your destination. But what would be nice when it displays a 1 (which means you will have one stop but no change of planes) if you could "highlight" the one and see where that aircraft is stopping on your way to your destination.
Just a suggestion, otherwise it looks great!!!!

Cody / AMA

Cody — Tue, 08/04/2009 - 13:22

Ok Sorry.. Now I see it!!!! " On direct flights (with stops but no change of planes), we will now show you the city location where your aircraft stops, a highly requested feature!
Thank You!!!!!

Cody / AMA

Cody — Tue, 08/04/2009 - 13:46

Cody,
we are one step ahead of you. It doesn't show in the screen shots, but I added a detail above

Brian Lusk — Tue, 08/04/2009 - 13:48

Any chance to be able to search by directly typing airport codes rather the drop down?

Anonymous — Tue, 08/04/2009 - 14:36

Didn't notice was an option for multi city available?
Like BNA-GEG return SEA-BNA without having to
do two tickets separately?

VLM — Tue, 08/04/2009 - 15:13

The site should also support Google Calendar, and maybe other online calendar services. Tons of people use Google's products.

Oh, and how about being able to log-in to Southwest's website with Google log-in? Or Open ID? Every website anymore requires a username and password. Would be much easier if each website just let you use your log-in credentials from Google, Yahoo, Windows Live, Facebook, etc.

tr83ca — Tue, 08/04/2009 - 16:13

Thanks for the iCal calendar addition!
It all sounds great.
And thanks for the in-flight peanut buffets...

Gordon — Tue, 08/04/2009 - 16:50

Booked 2 flights today and was lucky enough to get the new screen layouts. Let me tell you...VERY NICE! I was able to see much more information in one glance of the screen. Gave me all the fare rules when I selected my flight...and also it has the itinerary on the payment page now. Before there was no itinerary there, and you just prayed everything was correct when you hit PURCHASE.

This is such a great upgrade. Thanks Southwest! Had 2 great flights over the weekend to Louisville. Man your planes are FULL FULL FULL right now!

Cheers,
Drew

Anonymous — Wed, 08/05/2009 - 01:03

Hey guys who are asking for iCal and Google Cal love, good news!!

The iCal compatible download opens up the download window in firefox, and gives you option to open with iCal or Download the ICS file... So, iCal is covered! :)

Also, my understanding is that google allows you to import iCal files into the calendar really easily, so all you have to do is download the ICS file and import it into google.

http://lifehacker.com/167042/import-outlook-or-ical-to-google-calendar

Just pointing out some observations, hope this helps :)

Anonymous — Wed, 08/05/2009 - 15:18

I am also a mac user ----------- thanks for the iCal support

Anonymous — Wed, 08/05/2009 - 17:19

I am a Rapid Rewards member & a VERY loyal Southwest Airlines customer. I tried booking 4 roundtrip flights today, but could not because of the recent changes on the Southwest website. I tried & tried to book the flights and it was so frustrating! I've NEVER had any trouble booking flights in the past. I've always told friends/family that it is so easy to book w/ Southwest. I hope that I will be able to book flights online ASAP. If not, I guess I'll have to use another carrier.

dana — Fri, 08/07/2009 - 03:03

Dana,
We certainly appreicate your loyal patronage, and I am sorry that you ran into problems booking your flights. Looking at the time stamp on your comment, I may have a clue if you were trying to book the reservations at around the same time, especially if you were trying to use funds from a previous reservation. Everynight, around 1:00am CT, our Tehcnology folks take down many of the functions of booking online for routine daily maintenance. They use this time to transmit data to our stations for the upcoming day's operations and for some other duties. Usually booking a new reservation without transfer funds can be done, but exchanging funds is restricted. Usually this "downtime" lasts 20-30 minutes, but some nights it can last longer. Occasionally, they will have to bring the entire system down. I don't know if any of these scenarios apply to your circumstances (and if they don't, please call our Customer Support & Services [formerly Reservations] folks at 1-800-I-FLY-SWA for assistance), but I do know that the problems you encountered were very unusual.
Brian

Brian Lusk — Fri, 08/07/2009 - 07:03

Hey "Tuesday 14:36 Anonymous" I heard from our web site folks and have an answer for you:

Yes, this is also a new added feature if you go to book your flight from the "Book Travel" link instead of the "Book a Flight" widget on the homepage. The free form text fields allow you to type in a city name or airport code. Hooray!

Brian Lusk — Fri, 08/07/2009 - 12:47

When and why did Southwest stop their non-stop flights to Las Vegas?

JOY DAVIS — Thu, 08/13/2009 - 08:45

I am not sure why, but I continue to have issues booking on the new reservations page. The issues are concentrated in making a city selection. Sometimes the city listings work, sometimes not. But, when it does, and I select my cities, dates and times. It comes back with an error that I need to select a city again! It is quite frustrating as it took me 10 minutes before I could get through to finish booking a flight. Never had issues before and don't have any when booking a companion pass, which uses a traditional drop down listing. Otherwise, I love the changes...but, I just can't seem to get the city selection glitch working right!

Thanks,
Chris

Anonymous — Tue, 09/15/2009 - 12:46

I am having difficulty logging onto southwest website? I never had difficulty before about a month ago? I have been and still using Windows Vista. I have asked for on-line help but no-one seems to be able to figure this out? Is anyone else having this same problem that can help me?

Anonymous — Tue, 09/22/2009 - 23:25

I have not been able to access www.southwest.com for well over a month now. Nothing has changed on my end...comcast high-speed internet, windows xp. I can still get to southwestvacations.com and this blog. The number they gave me for support in Dallas gives me a busy signal. Very frustrating.

Lauren — Thu, 10/01/2009 - 14:17

I would like to be able to create a username for my SWA account. It's extremely annoying to have to find my SWA account# every-time I want to use the website. It only adds friction to the process and for my short trips up the coast, I will just go to another carrier where my username is something I remember.

alexinSD — Mon, 10/12/2009 - 08:27

I love the ability to download the flight details directly to iCal, (an apple user, obviously), but have been running into a weird bug. When I click on the first outbound leg, I get the dialogue box as normal, download, and everything works great. Then when I go to download the return leg, it also opens the dialogue box, downloads the reservation, inserts it into iCal, but then seems to delete the original outbound leg. Is this duplicated by anyone else? Thanks.

estop — Sun, 11/01/2009 - 18:03

I cannot get on your website anymore!! The pages take forever to load and it seems the computers in my house are the only ones having any problem! I can get on at work and everyone I know has no problem. Can you help? I really like Southwest but at this rate I'll never be able to book with you again if I can't get on! Thank you!

Leah — Sun, 11/08/2009 - 21:46

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