How Southwest Airlines is looking to bring hospitality to the skies

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Good marketing can do a lot of things—but it can’t disguise less-than-ideal customer experiences.

“No matter how much money you put in marketing, or how much you’re spending in advertising, sponsorships created, if you spend all of that and you bring someone in and they don’t have that Southwest experience, everything breaks,” Sabrina Callahan, Southwest’s SVP, chief digital and marketing officer, told us.

The airline—which has recently implemented a series of policy changes aimed at making it more competitive in the airline industry—is focused on getting the experience right as it looks to further bring tactics from the hospitality industry into air travel.

At Cannes Lions, we spoke to Callahan, along with Kate Rush Sheehy, the chief strategy officer at Southwest’s decades-long agency partner GSD&M, about amplifying the best of a brand experience and the power of long-lasting partnership.

Callahan on standing out through hospitality: We just went through the largest transformation, over the last year to 18 months, that this company has ever been through in 55 years...It was time to catch up to, hey, where do we need to be playing in this space to be able to give our customers what they expect versus back to just sticking with the old things?…We take a lot of pride in making that experience and that journey memorable for that customer in a way that only Southwest does. No other airlines do that. So coming in, okay, we need the hooks, we need to get [customers] in, but we also need to continue to give them such an amazing experience that they keep coming back, and that they stay loyal to Southwest…We’re just trickling down on the role of hospitality for the airline industry. I think it used to feel like hospitality was a nice-to-have, and I think in this transactional world, where people are so heavily leaning into digital, digital, digital, digital, and removing some of that human connection, we start to lose what’s special. My intent is to use digital where I can to remove the friction points—around the communication, in the end-to-end—but then allow our flight attendants and our front line the ability to amplify that face-to-face experience that only Southwest does.

Rush Sheehy on the power of long-term partners: In addition to having folks who have been on and worked around Southwest Airlines at the agency for 20 some 30, 40 years, you get great, sage wisdom about what is important to hold on to and what you can release. Because it’s important for brands to also evolve and think about what’s next and when not to be precious and when to be very precious…Then I would just offer the flip side. On the agency side, you can often be trying to win the next meeting, because you’re hanging on by your fingertips, right? And one bad meeting leads to, “Well, maybe they’re not cut out for it.” I think the long-term partnership means we can all have tough conversations, we can disagree, and the psychological safety is real. It leads to better debate, it leads to better-quality thought. It leads to more honest conversations. I think that’s what leads to better work.