nsx

8. What is the fee to change or cancel a reservation? What are the rules for re-use of funds? Can I re-use funds when making online purchases? What's the advantage of booking a round trip as 2 one-way trips? Why and when do funds expire?

a. (nsx) Southwest does not penalize you for canceling or no-showing a flight. If you bought a refundable fare with a credit card, you can ask for the entire amount to be refunded to your credit card. If you bought a non-refundable fare, the tax portion is refundable. The non-refundable portion is fully re-usable toward another purchase, but buying a refundable fare does not make your non-refundable portion refundable.

My editorial comment: The ability to change your plans without penalty is the biggest remaining differentiator for Southwest over its competition. Another one is getting a live person rather than a machine when you call the 800 number. Walk-up fares tend to be lower on Southwest. Other than these three items, it's hard to see any other area in which Southwest holds a significant edge.

b. (nsx) For example, suppose you buy online a $98.20 round-trip ticket which includes $14.20 of taxes. You no-show the outbound half and fly the return. This leaves you with $49.10 in ticketless funds, of which $7.10 is refundable. If you apply these funds toward a higher refundable fare, $42 of the funds will remain non-refundable and the rest will be refundable.

c. (nsx) Southwest provides bonus Rapid Rewards credit for online purchases at swabiz.com or (sometimes) at southwest.com. Furthermore, the best fares are often only available online. Fortunately, Southwest allows you to apply leftover ticketless funds to your online purchases. This was a very big deal when Southwest introduced it, since many of us were losing bonus credit when we had to make telephone reservations to re-use funds.

d. (nsx) If you book a round trip and then before the travel date you find a lower fare in one direction, you have three options: (1) Use the Change AIr Reservation option in Travel Center at southwest.com or swabiz.com, an option that does not allow you to book a Ding sale fare, (2) Book the lower fare on a new one-way reservation and have a leftover credit on your original round-trip record locator when your travel is complete, or (3) Cancel the entire round trip and rebook both halves, possibly having to pay a higher fare on the unchanged half.

For maximum flexibility to change plans or book a Ding fare, consider booking all your travel as one-way trips. The downside is that if you are not a frequent Southwest flier, booking one-way trips can increase your chance of drawing secondary screening, which is not too bad except that it blocks you from getting your A boarding pass online.

e. (nsx) You can re-use funds from up to four reservations on a single purchase. In the unlikely event that you have many record locators each containing a small amount of funds, you can proceed in stages. Use three of the small amounts plus one larger amount to purchase a new reservation, repeat several times, then cancel these reservations and apply them to another purchase.

f. (nsx) If you expect to re-use funds late at night before a fare sale ends, be aware that the funds re-use system goes down every night for about two hours starting at about 10:30 PM Pacific Time. This glitch catches even the most experienced of us from time to time. Another reason to get your reservations done before 10:30 PM is that sometimes a sale will end an hour early, even if it was supposed to last until midnight Pacific Time.

g. (nsx) Ticketless funds expire one year from the original purchase date. Travel must be completed by the expiration date. (This is a change from policy a few years ago.) When you combine funds, whether you are re-using multiple amounts or whether you are re-using one amount and adding funds, you need to be careful about funds expiration. Southwest's computer system can only carry a single expiration date for all the funds. Southwest has made an uncharacteristically aggressive business decision to retain the earliest funds expiration date. This means, for example, that you probably don't want to combine your $2 credit which expires in one month with $96 of new funds unless you are certain you are going to fly this trip. If you don't fly, the whole $98 will expire in one month. For this reason, my spreadsheet of reservations includes one column for the funds expiration date. You can check your funds expiration date by entering the confirmation number (record locator) and the name on the credit card used (not the passenger's name) in the View and apply Ticketless Funds page in the Travel Center at southwest.com. Southwest is reportedly planning to add online functionality to list all your ticketless funds. For people who travel weekly and have dozens of funded reservations, I expect that the do-it-yourself spreadsheet approach will still be necessary.

h. (nsx) If your ticketless funds expire, that includes both the refundable and non-refundable part. A phone call before the expiration date will at least get you a refund of the refundable part. You cannot do this online.

i. (nsx) If your ticketless funds have expired, I suggest that you write to Customer Relations and request a travel credit (currently available only as a paper credit: see item 33 for disadvantages). I would be surprised if they turned you down. Given this policy, I don't see why Southwest does not simply retain the latest, rather than the earliest, expiration date of funds being combined. But I am not Southwest's CFO, and there may be sound accounting reasons for Southwest's current policy.

j. (nsx) If you specify multiple sources of ticketless funds when purchasing a reservation, the sequence of funds use is as follows: Funds from your first listed confirmation number are used first. First the computer looks for refundable funds to apply to the refundable part of your purchase. If the first confirmation number has no refundable funds but the second confirmation number does, the refundable part will be taken from the second confirmation number. After the computer finds funds for the refundable part of your purchase, it then looks for non-refundable funds for the remainder of your purchase.

If the non-refundable funds in the first confirmation number are not sufficient, the computer taps the non-refundable funds from the second confirmation number. The same procedure is used for the third and fourth confirmation numbers.

Once all the non-refundable funds are used the computer will draw on refundable funds from the confirmation numbers in the order in which you listed them.

This algorithm replaces an earlier one that tapped only non-refundable funds until they were all used up. That method tended to leave with plenty of confirmation numbers that each contained a few dollars of refundable funds. These were a pain to clean up, requiring the time of customers and CSRs. If you want to maximize your refund and minimize the amount of ticketless credits you are carrying, you can phone Southwest and request refunds of the refundable portions a day or two before you apply these funds to a new reservation. Then you will find that only non-refundable funds remain.

k. (nsx) Award tickets can be changed at will with no penalty, provided that seats area available (capacity controlled seats in the case of a new award) on the new flight. You cannot change the passenger name on an award reservation. To change travelers, you must cancel the reservation (if you do this online before the day of travel, your award will be re-usable almost immediately) and book a new reservation using that award.

l. (Mr. July) You can cancel an online reservation within 24 hours of making it (that's 24 hours, not one calendar day) and get a full refund. I think that's leftover from the industry's own customer service plan from a few years back that pre-empted threatened federal legislation for an 'airline bill of rights' - the idea is that you can either put a reservation on hold for 24 hours or cancel within 24 hours. Other airlines have a similar 24-hour refund policy for online purchases.