Case Study: Southwest Airlines achieves $39M+ annual cost savings, improved on-time performance, and higher crew satisfaction with FICO Xpress Optimization

How Southwest Airlines ranked #1 in customer satisfaction while staying consistently profitable?

Southwest Airlines, the largest U.S. domestic carrier carrying over 100 million passengers on 3,900 flights a day, needed to manage rapidly growing operational complexity while improving customer experience and employee engagement. Manual processes for crew scheduling, fuel planning, gate assignments and disruption recovery were no longer viable, and the airline sought ways to reduce costs and maintain on-time performance amid volatile fuel prices and disruptive weather.

Southwest deployed FICO Xpress Optimization and FICO Optimization Modeler across crew scheduling, fuel tankering and purchasing, gate assignments and a real-time recovery tool (“Baker”). The initiatives cut fuel costs by $19M (tankering) and $20M (contracts) per year, saved $500K in lost payroll during slow months, reduced overtime, increased pilot schedule consistency by 15%, cut connection times and walking distances, and improved on-time performance by 10–15% during disruptions and 2% overall—with about 20 optimization applications in production and more planned.

Southwest Airlines

Rusty Burlingame

Senior Operations Research Developer