DALLAS — One of the knocks on Southwest Airlines is that you can’t fly to London or Paris on its planes.
Change isn’t imminent, but Southwest is finally taking baby steps into international service.
This week, it announced a deal to sell travel to Mexico in 2010 with partner Volaris, a well-financed, 2-year-old Mexican carrier. Southwest has already said it would team with WestJet to offer U.S.-Canada travel by late 2009.
Southwest executives are overseeing a technology makeover that will modernize its reservations system to handle more international travel. They are talking to other carriers about service to Hawaii and the Caribbean.
Competitors are paying close attention. Some may fear that Southwest Airlines could emerge as a low-cost rival on their lucrative international routes, just as it pushed beyond Texas and grew into the nation’s largest carrier by number of domestic passengers.
Others are courting Southwest. Last month, the chief executive of AirTran Airways said he would like to talk to Southwest about selling seats on each other’s planes and sharing the revenue.
Such arrangements are called code-sharing, because one airline puts its name or code on a flight operated by the other.
