Skip to main content

Southwest Airlines Community

Re: The Online Route Map

MarkHursh
Employee
Employee

Hi There!  Mark from the Southwest Digital team here.

 

Thank you so much for the feedback on this.  I have good news - we are far along our path to a new route map.  We have many Cohearts working on this including Gaurav, Dana, Greg, Byron, and partners that are hard at work to deliver this improved capability for our Customers.

 

We started this work earlier this summer to improve awareness about our changing network.  We hope to have something to you in the first half of 2022.  I have a sneak peek for you below.

 

We're still working on some finishing touches before we can launch this new capability.  Right now, we're working on resolving some issues with how the map performs on mobile devices, since more than 3 out of 4 visits are on mobile device, and we're working to improve the connecting flight information on the map.  That last bit about connecting flight data is what is causing us to spend a bit more time than we had planned.  Our prior interactive route map did not handle connecting route information as elegantly as we thought it should, so we're spending the energy to try to improve this during this round of improvements.

 

For a bit of background, we shifted to what we in the industry call dynamic connections back in 2015 when we moved to our Amadeus reservation system.  This allows us to create a schedule of our non-stop flights and then the reservation system dynamically creates connecting itineraries based upon certain criteria such a minimum connection time, maximum connection time, and to prevent things like circuitous routings.  Hence, we have a fancy algorithm that allows us to build connections dynamically so Customers have better options, but it's complex to get that list of connecting market pairs as it's constantly changing with every schedule revision.  We have the data in our internal systems but offering up at the scale of southwest.com is a bigger problem to solve.  Don't worry - we're working on it!  Those are really the last two pieces before we reactivate our interactive route map.

 

We hope to have something out early in 2022, but as always, roadmaps can shift, or unforeseen issues may arise which require us to change priority.  But please know we do definitely hear you and also want to offer this feature as quickly as possible.  

 

Here's a sneak peak of the experience that we are hoping to get in your hands as soon as possible.  For awareness, our design goals have been

 

  • Allow for easy filtering of non-stop and connecting markets
  • Show the breadth of nearby service so Customers can quickly see how many SWA destinations may be available (examples include the LA area, Boston, DC, San Francisco, New York) - we're also working on a feature to improve this in the shopping flow too!
  • Ensure it's easy to see our new locations in Hawaii, the Caribbean, and in Central America
  • Ensure our Customers on mobile devices can use our route map since now more than 75% of all visits are on a mobile device

We have taken this experience to Usability studies directly with Southwest Customers and they have been ecstatic about the capability.  They have helped us hone and improve the experience too in order to make it as intuitive as possible.

 

Route Map Desktop.png

Route Map Desktop 2.png

 

Route Map Mobile.png

 

In the future we would like to offer price points like we used to have on the Get Away Finder.  But we'd like to do that in a way that is more transparent.  So we have some behind the scenes work to do there so that when you see a price point on the route map you can indeed find it when shopping.  That work is underway but is farther out in the future.

 

I hope all this helps and please know we are definitely listening to your feedback.  We are so fortunate to have such kind, caring, and creative Customers like you.  

 

Thank you so much for choosing Southwest for your travel.

 

We'll also keep this thread updated once we launch the new route map.

 

With LUV,

Mark Hursh

Sr. Director Digital Customer Products

Southwest Airlines

 

 

 

 

 

Re: The Online Route Map

5280Av8r
Frequent Flyer C

For those that want an interactive route map right now, there's this website that you can use for all airlines: https://www.flightconnections.com/route-map-southwest-airlines-wn

You just change the airline and it'll show their route map. It's not as up to date as the individual airline's website, but it does pretty well with keeping up on route changes!

 

 

-Andrew E

DEN based | Southwest Passenger | Aviation Enthusiast


DEN (CLT) Based | Aviation Enthusiast | Full of Passion for Southwest