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What is Southwest SWABIZ?

SWABIZ Southwest Corporate Travel

SWABIZ is Southwest’s corporate booking tool. It allows your employees to book Southwest flights, hotels and car rentals through the tool and allows you to track all of these travel expenses.

What are the benefits of SWABIZ?

1. Different payment methods

Your staff can either pay with their own credit card or you can on a “ghost card”. A ghost card is a credit card that you add to SWABIZ that your employees can use for bookings but they can’t see the credentials of the card (e.g. the full credit card number, expiry date etc). You can enforce all travelers to use a ghost card, or give select travelers the flexibilty to use it or use their own credit card. You can have multiple ghost cards set up too.

2. EarlyBird Check-in

EarlyBird Check-in (from $15) is 36 hours before departure instead of the normal 24 hours if you check in normally. This means your travelers are automatically checked-in by Southwest and get their boarding passes a full 12 hours before other travelers who simply check-in online within 24 hours of departure. This gives your travelers a better boarding position, and thus earlier access to overhead bins.

3. Internal reference codes

You can set up internal reference numbers to record all expenses by department or project, or allow your travelers to add their own. These can be very useful for accounting and reconciliation purposes.

4. Corporate rates in one place

If you have corporate rates with any of the main car rental companies, you can add these codes into SWABIZ so those rates automatically show when your travelers search for a car.

5. Regular promotions

There’s a current promotion of 10% off Anytime & Business Select fares now through June 15, 2017 when you book via SWABIZ with the promo code SPRING2017.

Southwest Promotion Code

6. Reporting by traveler, type + more

Lastly, you can get detailed reports on travel spend for each employee, as well as by air, hotel and car bookings. You can view these reports online or download them into a CSV/spreadsheet file.

What are the downfalls of SWABIZ?

1. Not easier to book for others

There’s no way to save traveler details on each staff member and book on their behalf easily. So if there’s one person in your company who books on behalf of others, they still have to store all staff passport details and Rapid Rewards numbers in a spreadsheet or notepad and enter this into the site for every booking.

2. No company points

There’s no such thing as SWABIZ points, the company doesn’t earn points, rewards or miles of any kind, only individuals can earn Rapid Reward points. This is unlike Delta where companies can earn Delta SkyBonus points on top of travelers earning Delta Skymiles for each trip. Other airlines like American Airlines and United also have corporate programs where you essentially “triple-dip” on the points spectrum.

3. Not a one-stop-shop

If you use other airlines or you book anywhere else (even on Southwest.com instead of SWABIZ.com) for your work travel, then those bookings will not get pulled into your SWABIZ travel spend reports. So it’s not a one-stop-shop for all your travel needs and the reports are limited to what is booked through SWABIZ.

How much does it cost?

It costs nothing to register for SWABIZ.

Where can I register for SWABIZ?

You can enroll your company into the SWABIZ program here. You will need your company’s Tax Identification Number (TIN) or D-U-N-S Number (D&B) to register.

Once registered, you’ll be given a SWABIZ Company ID. You need to give this to your staff to add to their Southwest Rapid Rewards account. Note that this doesn’t give you access to their points in any way, it simply allows you to track the bookings they make through SWABIZ. They can log in here or they can create an account here.

You will receive an email every time someone registers on SWABIZ with the Company ID.

How can Flightfox help?

If you and your team fly Southwest regularly, you can use SWABIZ and Southwest to your advantage, especially if you sign up to 1 or more of their credit cards. By signing up to a Southwest credit card, you can “double-dip” on points, where the person traveling receives points for traveling, and the credit card owner receives points for paying.

Southwest Premier Business Credit Card 60,000 Point Bonus

With the current Southwest bonus points promotions, by signing up to 2 Southwest credit cards, you can immediately earn the Southwest Companion Pass which allows another person to fly with you for free for up to 23 months, no matter how much you travel (they still have to pay taxes, but this is $6 for a domestic flight). You can also change your companion 3 times per year.

If you travel a lot with the same staff members, the Companion Pass can come in very handy when trying to reduce your travel spend.

You can also set a Southwest credit card as your ghost card on SWABIZ so that all of your staff use it for work travel. You will then earn points for paying for the trips.

At Flightfox, we can help you manage your company travel spend over all airlines and booking platforms so you can have an overall view of everything travel-related. We can recommend which credit cards you should be applying for and we’ll use them for the best return on earning and redeeming points. Whatever your needs are for your business, we can help you make the most of your travel soend and get the rewards you deserve, like flying for free or flying first class! Just request a Flightfox demo to try it out.