I'm thinking Wednesday was a slow news day.
One of our Warriors in the Public Relations department called me Wednesday after an Associated Press reporter called to ask why Southwest wasn't accepting reservations past October 30. The reporter was curious about the lack of Holiday availability. I gave my colleague from P.R. the page on southwest.com where she can find the next schedule release date (http://www.southwest.com/travel_center/travel_center.html?ref=trvltls_gn) and didn't think anything more about it. Neither did she.
Until later Wednesday afternoon, that is. The reporter actually wrote a story about our not yet offering our schedule for Thanksgiving and Christmas. True, there are other facts about other airlines in his piece, but the fact that "Southwest is not yet accepting reservations for the Holidays" made the headline. That got me to reminiscing (and laughing) about the sound flaming you guys gave me early in 2007 when I did a blog piece about the subject--and how we actually changed our business practices based on the gaping wound of dissatisfaction I unwittingly ripped open with that blog post. The very fact that you can now access our next anticipated schedule release date at southwest.com is one of those changes, as is the fact that barring something catastrophic, we will never again drop below 120 days of booking inventory. And we are working with other groups across the Company to be able to add more and more inventory out there as we go forward.
So heads up, Associated Press....we scooped you on this over a year ago! But we hope you'll become devoted readers of "Nuts About Southwest!" You'd be surprised what you--and we--can learn! 😉
