Southwest Airlines Co. grew into the nation’s fourth
biggest over the past four decades by flying exclusively within the continental
U.S. But with dwindling growth opportunities at home, it has started launching
flights to the Caribbean and two tourist destinations in Mexico. Coming soon:
flights to the Dominican Republic, Costa Rica and Mexico City.
The overseas expansion, while banal by the standards of its
big rivals, has required huge changes of Dallas-based Southwest. It had to
install a reservations system capable of handling foreign bookings and train
staff in everything from how to interact with air-traffic controllers speaking
heavily accented English to how to use life rafts if a plane needs to ditch at
sea. And, surprisingly in a profession where cheap travel is a major perk, many
employees needed to get passports, according to the company and two unions.
So far, international flights are a small part of
Southwest’s business. It started by flying to Puerto Rico in the spring of
2013, and in July it launched flights to Aruba, the Bahamas and Jamaica. The
following month it added Cancun and Cabo San Lucas in Mexico. By November, it
expects to offer more than 30 daily flights to eight overseas destinations, in
addition to nearly 3,600 flights to about 90 U.S. airports.
Southwest sees a big opportunity. It has identified 50 new
places it could reach with its all- Boeing Co.
737 fleet, Mr. Van De Ven said. It plans to add flights to a handful of foreign
cities from U.S. cities where it has major operations, then let the network
evolve. While Southwest will probably remain a mostly domestic carrier, the
international destinations could bring financial benefits by accelerating the
growth of its core customer base, according to Moody’s Investors Service.
The expansion is a boon for previously landlocked employees.
Still, international flights on the pioneer of budget air travel lack some
frills that employees at other airlines enjoy. The only overnight layovers now
are in Aruba and San Juan, because Southwest schedules most flights so the
plane merely touches down for an hour or so and then leaves again.
Mr. Van De Ven said Southwest is reluctant to raise costs
further, and it believes pilots and attendants are already well paid compared
with peers at other carriers who work on similarly sized airplanes.
In preparing for the new flights, Southwest’s 8,000 pilots
have had the most changes to digest. They have to report their identities,
altitudes and locations to foreign air-traffic controllers—sometimes from
several countries—something they don’t do in the U.S. They must also do
security walk-arounds of their planes before each flight, whereas in the U.S.
they just have to check the plane once as long as they’re with the same one on
multiple hops.
Southwest borrowed a program from AirTran under which senior
aviators initially ride along in the cockpit to see how the pilots perform on
new international routes. Along with training the pilots for the new routes,
Southwest loads briefings about each foreign destination onto the iPads pilots
use in the cockpit to access manuals, checklists and maps. Southwest plans to
give extra compensation to attendants who are fluent in the foreign language
needed when they fly an international route.
Some of the changes are prosaic. Southwest stocks planes
leaving the U.S. with extra peanuts and pretzels and double ice, half of which
is carried in coolers in the belly of the plane until needed for the return
trip. It also fills the plane’s water tanks to the brim and ensures that the
lavatory tanks are empty before departure. This means it won’t have to rely on
vendors at its foreign destinations and can make quicker turnarounds.
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