About Getaways by Southwest™

Southwest is ‘the airline with Heart’ — committed to delivering unmatched hospitality through friendly, reliable, and low-cost air travel. In 2025, the airline launched Getaways by Southwest, a vacation package brand designed to bring Southwest’s hallmark hospitality, flexibility, and value to end‑to‑end trips. Customers can bundle Southwest flights with hotels and car rentals for a single, streamlined purchase experience. They also receive elevated rewards points, two free checked bags per passenger, and dedicated support from the Southwest Care team.

Bringing vacations home

After years of offering vacation packages through a third party, Southwest brought the vacation experience in‑house to serve customers better with the same service and flexibility expected from Southwest. The goal was a unified and branded digital journey that allows Southwest to personalize hotel and vacation recommendations based on searched flights, and provide customers meaningful savings versus booking items separately. 

Through usability testing, Southwest knew that when booking a vacation, customers want to see the location of a hotel and the distance from the airport and major landmarks. Southwest Airlines already uses Mapbox for its route map, so the Getaways by Southwest team had a head start when identifying a map provider that would fit their needs for vacation search results.

We already trusted Mapbox and wanted to maintain a consistent front and back-end map experience across our brands. The Mapbox platform was flexible enough to integrate into multiple systems, and it was customizable enough to design the map according to our unique brand specifications. 
Ann Bui, Sr. Digital Group Product Manager, Southwest Airlines

An interactive, branded booking experience

Even with an architecture that spans multiple systems and domains, the Southwest digital experience leads were able to efficiently insert Mapbox maps using Mapbox GLJS. Getaways by Southwest serves an interactive map on the hotel selection page on its responsive website. On the map, customers can see hotel locations at a glance, compare neighborhoods, and get a better understanding of proximity to landmarks, attractions, beaches, venues, and the airport, allowing them to make a better-informed booking selection.

Customers can smoothly toggle between list and map views to suit their style of planning. Customers can also interact with the map by clicking on a hotel icon which serves up more details in the side navigation. The most recently clicked icon appears in a different color so it’s easy to see which hotel was just viewed. Initial feedback from customers is that they enjoy having options so that they can search for hotels the way they prefer.

A benefit of the design flexibility of Mapbox maps is that despite having multiple vendors contributing to the project, the team’s designers could use the maps to make the entire customer journey feel like a seamless, branded experience – from inspiration to checkout.

We introduced a new Getaways color palette that differentiated us from the airline but still felt native to the Southwest brand. We were able to use map color to emphasize tourist areas and landmarks, while still keeping the aesthetic clean so hotel content and context could shine. 
Ann Bui, Sr. Digital Group Product Manager, Southwest Airlines

Maps drive higher conversion for Getaways

Initial usage data from the Getaways by Southwest site confirms the importance of maps in the vacation booking customer journey. 

The results are clear. Shoppers who engage with the Mapbox map on the listings page have a 27% higher conversion rate than those who don’t. These insights are informing our ongoing optimization as we continue finding ways to drive conversion.
Ann Bui, Sr. Digital Group Product Manager, Southwest Airlines

By bringing vacation planning in-house and integrating Mapbox maps, Southwest has turned visualization into conversion — giving customers the clarity they need to book confidently. The Getaways team continues to build on this foundation, using insights from map engagement to shape the future digital travel booking experience for Getaways by Southwest.