Jean-Michel Saulnier
All work

Southwest Notification Vacation

A phone site for Southwest Airlines that counted the unread notifications in a member's home-screen screenshots and paid them out as Rapid Rewards points.

Three screens of the Notification Vacation phone site: the opening screen, red notification badges flying up from three phones while they are counted, and a result of 7,618 points.

The site on a phone. Captured from the production build, with home screens made up for the capture

Role
Senior developer on the whole web campaign: site, service and admin tool
With
GSD&M
Year
2026
Built with
Vue, WebGL, TypeScript, Node.js, PostgreSQL, Next.js
What the AI did
A vision model read each screenshot and counted the unread badges on it.

The project

Notification Vacation was the part of Southwest Airlines' "Enter Airplane Mode" campaign, made with the agency GSD&M, that people could join in.

A Rapid Rewards member entered a member number on a phone and uploaded up to ten screenshots of their home screens. The site counted the unread badges and paid a point for each, up to 10,000. Southwest put 150 million points into it.

My part

I joined six days before launch and worked across the whole web campaign: the upload flow on the site, the service that counted the notifications and awarded the points, and the campaign team's admin tool. GSD&M designed the site, and its animated front end was in place when I joined.

Result

The site went live on 5 October 2026, the day Southwest announced the campaign, and took entries through the one-week promotion.

Four screens of the site in order: entering a Rapid Rewards number, the upload screen, three uploaded home screens under the heading "Time to review", and the counting screen.
Member number, upload, review and count
The Notification Breakdown screen: 7,618 notifications, listed by app, from Mail with 2,823 down.
The count, app by app
The screen shown when a day's points had gone: "Wow. Everyone clearly needed a Notification Vacation.", with a button to take the Burnout Quiz.
When a day's points were gone
The site in a desktop browser: a phone on a cloudy sky showing a QR code, with the line "Scan the QR code to continue on mobile".
On a desktop, a code to continue on a phone