fredpeckville

I'm sorry if this has been discussed before, but I haven't seen it.

By definition it has always been possible to use a RR to get anywhere in southewest's system one-way, including airports not normally sold on one PNR. For instance, although ISP-PHL isn't a route served by southwest it can be ticketed as a point to point ticket using a rapid reward. The method by which to do this on WN's website is to use the first column in booking as the originating city, followed by the middle column as the connection city and the last column as the arrival city.

IE a common routing for PHL to ISP would be

1st column PHL
2nd column MDW
3rd column ISP

with both departing and arrival dates being the same.

Interstingly enough the connecting seems to be able to be nearly any city served by WN. Also although forcing a layover usually can only be limited to I think 3 hours in situations such as the one listed above the three hour limit doesn't apply.

This results in an interesting use of a RR, I have a good friend who goes to school in PHL who's mother lives in MCO and who's father has an office in ISP, for him it is possible for him to visit his mother in MCO for approx 12 hours or so on the way to his father's office in ISP, using only half a RR.

This back door is only really useful in most cases where two airports are relatively close together for instance WAS and BWI can, I believe it was trickier to ticket, use this method to take one day trips to places on half an RR.

The question I have is since

"For one roundtrip Award, you can make roundtrip reservations for travel to destinations in the continental U.S., including New York's LaGuardia Airport, Washington D.C.'s Reagan National Airport, and Dallas/Ft. Worth International Airport. And, for two roundtrip Awards,"

it would stand to reason that for half a round trip award you should be able to fly one way between ISP and LGA possibly with the connecting city anywhere you wanted, as is the case with other cities that service isn't scheduled between. Could one not use this as a cheaper way for one day meetings etc? It would seem that this is more ideal than any other airport combinations because there is easy relatively cheap access to both ISP and LGA via public transit. (The problem with using the phl isp example or most airports is that you would have a concern as to how to get to and from the aiport considering you couldn't leave your car at one because you would be arriving to another etc. I know LIRR out in the morning would be possible returning on amtrak at night but this would defeat the purpose i think)

Sorry for making this post so long, but I think the part about what was possible was complicated and not discussed enough to be well known before going into the question about the new ATA rewards.

The problem/concern is that I haven't been able to get a flight to "price out" using the website to go from LGA to ISP as one half a RR, perhaps a phone call is needed? What are thoughts and ideas about this whole concept?

Thanks!

expert7700

you answered your own question.

If you look, and start booking a hypothetical trip, when you select award tickets to use, you can see that certain routes can definitely be booked in the method you describe and they only require 0.5 reward ticket (subject to the rules in the faq, like needing 4hr or less layover) while others require 1.0

If you build your own service for which there IS an alternate, scheduled route, the site (and the phone in system, AND the system even gate agents use) will take 1.0 award. If you build your own service for a trip where there is no alternate, scheduled serivce (thus you NEEDED to book it this way), as long as there is no overnight layover and the layover is under 4hrs, it will only count as 0.5 award

I had experience and another post on this earlier this year. we missed our flight mco-buf, then travelled mco-mdw-pit with a 3hr layover at mda. although our original mco-buf used only 0.5 reward ticket, the mco-mdw-buf segment that the GATE AGENT booked for us since we missed our fliht required and took two reward vouchers. the agent was mad at the compter and told us to board even without tickets, that she would fix things once airborne. the computer kept telling her 'insufficient funds for travel' even though she cancelled our mco-pit route. the insufficient funds had nothing to do with the PFC fee and everything to do with us not having 2 award voucher halves listed . imagine my surprise when I got back home and saw they took out an entire Round trip award voucher to fly me one way.

customer servce came to the rescue after many weeks and they did a one time courtesy 0.5 award ticket credit, with a stern lecture for watching out on my own (even though it was there mistake)

cabinpressure

There seem to be stricter rules for awards on ATA-operated flights (no unpublished routing option):

"For one Award, you can fly roundtrip on any service we sell in the continental U.S., which includes codeshare or ATA Airlines-only service to destinations like New York’s LaGuardia Airport (LGA), Washington D.C.’s Reagan National Airport (DCA), and Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport (DFW)."

Source: http://www.southwest.com/rapid_rewar...tions_faq.html

fredpeckville

Thank you both for your input. Oh, well it was worth a shot.

I'd like to make a note that whether it's an error with WN's website it seems the 4 hour rule on layover does not apply in regards to booking this sort of ticket on WN metal.

expert7700

the 4hr layover rule seems like it is not the 'only' rule... but it's the only portion of the formula that we were disclosed by WN.

I don't know what other conditions dictate whether or not it will allow you to use .5 RR or 1.0 RR when booking. from what little research I did, it seemed that when you pick an itinerary between your origin and final destination that is not sold in any way without booking as a 2-step trip, it generally priced out as 0.5 RR (provided of course layover was <4hrs). However I found many examples of it not working as expected too.

I suspect that during the wright agreement, many flights from dallas, for example, which needed a stopover city and round trip in order to book it somewhere else, were set to use only 0.5 RR.

I missed in your original post that your question was more of "how does this apply now that we can book ATA travel" which I don't really have any clue on, but I think the other poster's answer is correct. I think if WN doesn't sell it as a published 1 way trip, it won't bill out as .5 RR

chunk

I don't understand how you book a point to point trip on Southwests website.

The first column is the originating city, the second column is the destination city, and the third column is the return city. How can you choose a connecting city?

curbcrusher

The first column is the originating city, the second column is the connecting city, and the third column is the destination city. You book a separate one-way, point-to-point (if necessary) trip for the return.

chunk

But that doesn't work. The columns are labeled, "Depart", "Arrive", and "Return" and the site won't let you proceed without choosing both a depart date and a return date. If you choose the same day for depart and return, then one of two things happens:
1. If the "layover" is long it still shows up like a regular round trip and you get billed for two flights (like a regular round trip).
2. If the "layover" is short I get the error message, "The Reservation System is unable to price the flight you selected."

What am I missing?

[EDIT: ohhh, I see with certain city combinations you don't get the error message and, although it initially shows two halves of a RR like a regular round trip, when you go to pricing it changes to only one half.....suddenly this whole thread makes sense.]

chunk

When doesn't the 3 hour limit apply?

I was able to price out LGA-MDW-ISP w/ .5 RR just fine (subject to the 3 hour limit).

Strangely enough I was also able to price out IAD-DEN-IAD w/ .5 RR.

We should make a thread to catalog all these anomalies.

expert7700

here's one that doesn't work

MCO-MDW-PIT prices at two half tickets with only a 2.5hr layover.
I confirmed this in the 'buy now' screen it showed both an A and a B portion of the RR ticket being used.

southwest said it's becuase I chose my own route/flight times, when they do have non stop or one stop published service on their own listed from MCO-PIT

that makes little sense to me, because I'm sure the examples you listed which priced out at 0.5 ticket, southwest also sells service from your origin to desination

Depart Nov 03 Fri 1 MCO-MDW-PIT 1416 Depart Orlando (MCO) at 5:15 PM
Arrive in Chicago (MDW) at 7:00 PM
539 Change planes in Chicago (MDW) departing at 9:30 PM
Arrive in Pittsburgh (PIT) at 11:45 PM

fredpeckville

ahh people are beginning to catch on to what I'm talking about :-) It can be useful in plenty of cases.

The anomalies seem to happen most often with routes not served by WN.

I couldn't get IAD-DEN-IAD to price out ... but I could get IAD-DEN-DCA to price at .5rr.

If you're reffering to the examples I listed, there was not service scheduled for any of them.

Incidentally these things are of great value to me because I'm a college student and was targeted for triple credit out of ISP for Sept.- Nov. so soon enough I'll have MR'd ISP-BWI 10 times RT yielding 5 RRs and a CP pass for $158 per RR .... so using half of one will essentially get me and my companion to anywhere WN flies Round trip for less than 24hrs for about $40 each.

Not bad!

JerryFF

Is it any wonder that the airlines find it necessary to tighten their rules or impose more restrictions?

gregorygrady

I found this "glitch" (?) myself about a year or two ago. I think I probably even posted it here on FT if you wanna go do a search for that thread. At the time, it didn't really seem like there was a ryhme or reason to how they decided what got charged 1/2 an RR award vs. what got charged a full RR award. You just had to enter in the origins and destinations and see what popped out. The things that I did stumble onto were that you could NOT stay anywhere more than 4 hours, if the connection wasn't under 4 hours, then you were charged a full RR award. I saw you mentioned above that you could stay up to 12 hrs, have you gotton any connections up to 12 hours to price out at only 1/2 an RR? I never could do it. Thus I figured that the only thing this would be good for is a courier (sp?) or somebosy like that who only needed to drop off stuff and then return. Or possibly a short layover in a third city to have lunch with a friend or something like that. I also figured you could probably extend the 4 hour connection rule to about 6 hours by using the "flat-tire" rule. But alas, I never found a time to take advantage of this "glitch".

Oh yeah, back when I was looking at it, if I remember correctly you couldn't go from the same airport and back to the same airport. I think I checked thru a bunch of scenarios and could only get something like BWI-MCO-PHL and other such itineraries to work. So if you don't have 2 SWA airports near you, then it really wouldn't work. And when I looked it was before you could use RR awards on ATA. It might make it easier to attempt this now that ATA will allow RR redemption to DCA/DFW/JFK (or LGA is it?)/etc.

fredpeckville

Yep, maybe 12 hours was an overstatement, I don't want to go and look it up now but I got isp-mco-phl to price out at 1/2 RR for significantly more than 4 hours. A lot of other cities have been possible for over 4 hours to, maybe it has changed over the past couple years

gregorygrady

Hmmm, interesting. Things definitely changed then over the past couple years. I tried boatloads of different scenarios & city pairs back in the day and while I could get 3 hr 55 min connections to work, I could NEVER get a single connection of 4 hours or more to work. I certainly could see using a 1/2 an RR award to go see a friend if I could stay there 12 hours, but I figured 4 hours was too little, especially since it would take a full hour or so unloading and then getting there a little early for security, etc.