I’m back in Washington after a great visit to Dallas and Southwest Airlines’ headquarters for media day. Kudos to their communications team for putting together a fantastic program for the reporters, analysts, and bloggers present. Thanks are also due to Southwest for its hospitality and openness. Southwest had us meeting and talking with their top executives, right up to Gary Kelly.
Me with Paula Berg
A special thanks goes to Southwest’s “blog girl” and communications director, Paula Berg, who was responsible for inviting us “emerging media” folks down to Dallas. She runs Nuts about Southwest, which Brett Snyder calls “the best” of the airline blogs. It was a real pleasure to meet Paula.
Me with Rob Mark
I also had the pleasure of meeting a number of the industry’s top bloggers in person, all of whom you’ll find in the blogroll on the right and many of whom I’ve communicated with by e-mail in the past. Jetwhine‘s Robert Mark; Flight reporter Megan Kuhn, who writes the Terminal Q blog; Holly Hegeman of Plane Business; and Star-Telegram reporter Trebor Banstetter, who blogs with a Metroplex focus at Sky Talk.
Paula said she had hoped that Brett Snyder (a.k.a. the Cranky Flier) could make it, but his nuptials this weekend seem to have taken priority. Congratulations!
Evan Sparks's Aviation Policy Blog 
It was great meeting you, Evan! I agree that Southwest put a good program together – not many companies will give reporters (from both old and new media) that kind of access to top executives. So they certainly deserve a lot of credit.
[…] number of travel industry experts gave us a little crystal ball gazing before they took questions. My friend Evan Sparks covered much of the detail of that panel at his blog the other day. What really grabbed me though was when one of the panelists explained the few existing airline […]