Nuts About Southwest

Be sure and listen to last week's Red Belly Radio podcast interview of Kendall.

You know the people I’m talking about: the ones that can’t seem to put their smartphones away.  Ever.  In fact, it physically hurts them to put their phone away during a flight, and when their plane lands and they hear that DING!, they have to turn their phone on immediately.  They have to call someone, send a text, or check their email now…RIGHT NOW. Yeah, those people are so ridiculous…I really wish I wasn’t one of them.  

My name is Kendall Ramirez, I’m an iPhone user, and I have a full-fledged addiction.  I even have an old school 2G iPhone, but I love it!  It may not be lightning fast or have GPS, but I’m lost if I don’t have it within arm’s reach.  

With that kind of addiction, you can understand why I’m so excited that Southwest has launched our first iPhone app.  If I do say so myself, it’s a pretty cool app, and (even better!) it’s free.  You can book reservations, checkin for your flight, check your flight’s status, view flight schedules, and more.  If you’re a Rapid Rewards Member, you can access your account, see your credit balance, view your upcoming flights, and even see your flight history.  So, the app gives you access to the most important functions you need while you’re out and about.  

Plus, the extra feature I really love is DING!  We’ve had our DING! desktop widget for years, which allows you to get deeply discounted, limited-time-only air fare deals on select flights.  But, you can only get the deals through DING! (they aren’t available on southwest.com) so if you were away from your desk when you were DING!-ed, you could completely miss a great deal.  Now, if you have your iPhone with you (which, if you’re like me, you always do) you won’t miss a DING! deal.  Now, that’s a great app!  

We also have plenty of plans for future enhancements.  We’ve heard from many users that they want the ability to checkin from their list of upcoming flights.  That totally makes sense and we have it on our short list of enhancements.  Plus, we have a few more ideas up our sleeves.  And, don’t worry, we won’t forget about all you non-iPhone users.  We know you want an app, too, and we’re on it.  So, stay tuned…