SWABrian

Augie,
Here's an example of those changes, and this one isn't a secret. The article to which I linked way up at the top is about our new airport computers. Once they are in place, it will give our Airport Employees complete access to the Ticketless system, and they can finally sell Ticketless for travel. Until now, the airports only saw a snap shot of the most current available funds. And, if they needed to change a reservation, even during irregular ops, they would have to "drop" the funds to a paper ticket before changes could be made. Then, those paper funds go off the radar so to speak of our reservations folks. The only way to track paper ticket usage is through our finance computers. That's just one of the things CS2 will correct and simplify.

And ftnoob and Insulator-King, our current VP of Marketing, Sales, and Distribution, Kevin Krone, was one of the members of the Team that developed the Southwest Home Gate which became southwest.com. Our "high-level executives" aren't living in a vacuum. They fully know the importance of upgrading all of our systems, and they regularly meet with our IT project Leaders--the folks who are doing the actual design and programming. It's not a question of lack of knowledge or will to change, its battling through years of complexity brought on by systems designed to meet a need for a department but not necessarily being able to talk to other systems within the Company.

Now, we have that uniformity in vision, we are bringing uniformity to our systems, but it takes time to unravel 30 years or so of independent system silos.