Southwest Scrutinizes Screen-Scraping Access

Southwest Airlines now is mulling what to do about corporate travel distributors that are screen-scraping fares and inventory off its Web site without permission.

Unlike global distribution system participation, there is no charge to Southwest for such access, but the airline is weighing whether this poses competition to its site and its Swabiz booking tool.

For corporate buyers, accessing Southwest and other suppliers that decline to participate in all GDSs is more important than ever at a time when their departments' integrity is questioned by corporate travelers and executives who think they can get better fares elsewhere. Moreover, new policies by the major airlines are driving corporations to JetBlue, Southwest and other low-cost carriers. Even legacy carriers admit that the Southwest way is on a collision course with domestic dominance.

"We are aware of screen-scraping occurring," said Rob Brown, a Southwest regional director responsible for corporate products. "It's something that we're looking into and we haven't yet decided how we are going to address it."

Southwest has been known to turn off distributors in order to control its own inventory. Last year, it stopped filing fares with the Airline Tariff Publishing Co. to cut off access by Orbitz (BTN, July 16, 2001). Years ago, it shunned most GDSs.

The carrier did not name any current offenders, but one of them is New York-based FareChase, which provides Web fares to Outtask's Cliqbook product, Amadeus' E-Travel and others. While FareChase now gets inventory from southwest.com, a spokesperson last week said FareChase did not have an agreement with the carrier, but they are negotiating.

Atlanta-based AgentWare, whose Web-fare search tool is being implemented by Sabre's Menlo Park, Calif.-based GetThere subsidiary, said it does not scrape Southwest's site pending discussions with the carrier, according to an AgentWare spokesperson. A spokesperson for SideStep, another search tool, said it has an agreement with Southwest that gives it access. "We do not search sites owned by airlines that don't want to work with us," he said.

Other travel suppliers face similar issues.

"We're comfortable with people doing that as long as there are some standard protocols," said JetBlue vice president of sales and distribution Tim Claydon. "For example, we want a relationship and an understanding and an agreement with these firms. We don't want just anyone to grab information off our site, particularly if we don't know they are being professional."

"We allow certain engines access to our site,"