Rearden Commerce clients to access Southwest Airlines flights

Rearden Commerce and Southwest Airlines struck a deal in which mutual customers will be able to search the airline’s schedules and fares and book Southwest flights using the Rearden Personal Assistant.

The partnership is slated to be implemented late in 2010, the companies say.

Rearden clients would need their own relationships with Southwest to access the airline’s schedules and fares through the Rearden Personal Assistant.

When booking Southwest through the Rearden Personal Assistant, travelers’ Southwest itineraries would automatically populate in their Lotus Notes or Outlook calendars and can opt to receive alerts about flight and gate status on their mobile devices.

The Rearden-Southwest partnership highlights Southwest’s strategy in recent years to broaden its number of approved distributors. Several corporate booking tools as well as the Travelport GDS in recent years have reached agreements with Southwest to access and book its flights.

Rearden clients will be able to integrate booking and ticketing that supports Southwest’s Rapid Rewards loyalty program at the time of booking; live availability and last seat inventory, as well as features including deferred ticketing, cancellations and exchanges.

In other news, Rearden partnered with IBM to give Rearden clients the ability to integrate IBM’s Global Expense Reporting Solution into the Rearden Commerce Platform.

The partnership gives Rearden clients another option for handling expense management and online procurement.

Related posts:

1. Rearden Commerce claims better mobile-mashup
2. Concur corporate-booking tool and mobile app land Southwest Airlines
3. Given a platform, founder of Rearden Commerce takes umbrage at booking tool label
4. Concur clients can book Amtrak, compare train and air fares
5. Rearden Mobile Personal Assistant reaches beyond Amex booking tool