Southwest Airlines Leverages Varolii Interact Mobile Communications for Pilot Scheduling

Varolii, an independent market and technology company in interactive, personalized business-to-consumer text, voice and email communications, announced that it has partnered with Southwest Airlines, a nationwide carrier, to streamline its process for matching pilot availability with flight needs.

Using the Varolii Interact platform, Southwest Airlines uses SMS text messages to alert pilots of flight scheduling opportunities. Based on Varolii's Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution, Southwest Airlines' Open Time Alerts (OTA) helps the airline staff unassigned flights, ensure on-time flight operations and reduce costs from a less efficient, manual process.

In cases of illness or other circumstances that prevent a pilot from attending their scheduled flights, airlines are left with "open time," or an uncovered shift, that must be reassigned. Prior to implementing the OTA solution, Southwest's crew scheduling departments had to make hundreds of manual phone calls each day to pilots to fill open shifts. Schedulers were also required to follow a specific call sequence, starting with the most senior pilots, which created lag times from waiting for responses before moving on to the next pilot on the list. This not only wasted resources, but made it difficult to schedule pilots for unfilled flight times.

With the Varolii Interact platform, Southwest's OTA solution provides pilots with an opt-in program that delivers SMS text messages directly to their mobile devices to alert them of open flights and give them the real-time opportunity to opt-in to staff specific flights. Each message includes detailed flight information, including the length of the assignment, overnight accommodations, if necessary, flight time and more. Pilots receive the information in a pre-determined cascade of priority, based on seniority and other factors, and can respond instantly on their phone using Varolii Interact's two-way text messaging capability to notify Southwest's crew scheduling department if they are interested in the assignment. As a result, Southwest has been able to streamline its scheduling processes and improve the flow of information to their pilot group.

Southwest Airlines said it uses Varolii to exchange more than 100,000 OTA text messages to pilots each month. Out of the airline's 6,067 active pilots in the company, more than two-thirds have signed up for the opt-in OTA program since the solution was first implemented in December of 2010.

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