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Southwest Behind the Scenes Heroes: Business Development

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Employee

While you may be familiar with the Customer Service Agent who helps you at the airport, the Flight Attendant who serves you drinks and Hospitality at 35,000 feet, and the Pilot who get you safely to your destination, there are hundreds of Teams who work behind the scenes to keep Southwest successful and our Customers happy.  Here is one such group.

 

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Business Development is a department made up of Regional Planning, International Planning, and Corporate Sales. They work to create long-term, sustainable growth for Southwest, and identify opportunities and begin the path of execution.

 

  • Regional Planning focuses on domestic cities, driving cross-functional city alignment to execute commercial objectives. We also work with our Commercial partners to develop our long-term strategy in each of the cities that we fly to. Additionally, the Team identifies the main drivers in business performance at a city and route level and makes recommendations on how to improve results.
  • International Planning is who we can thank for all of Southwest’s amazing international destinations (Grand Cayman anyone), which helped push our airline to having over 100 cities. The Team works to identify new international cities and routes while developing our international capacity.   To further our international offerings, the Team builds relationships with foreign carriers setting the foundation for future potential airline partnerships.
  • Corporate Sales consists of account managers located strategically throughout the country who are responsible for managing relationships with corporate travel decision makers of businesses of all sizes. We work to ensure Southwest is the preferred airline to companies through negotiating customized contracts and selling Southwest Airlines’ suite of corporate travel products.

Number of Employees and location
Business Development has 52 Employees—34 working out of HDQ and 18 working and living in the regions they cover. This provides our department the unique advantage of being able to truly understand a marketplace and the needs of our corporate Customers. Our HDQ-based Employees make frequent visits to their regions in order to better build the connections with the communities Southwest serves.

 

Fun Facts

  • Business Development is Southwest’s newest department, and was founded in March 2016.
  • Corporate Sales has grown the Corporate travel revenue portfolio to nearly $3 Billion over the past 10 years.
  • Four of our Cohearts can juggle while another is a balloon animal aficionado … so we’re one step away from our own Southwest Circus. Any fire breathers feel free to apply!

 

 

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