Expired Travel Funds

[angelgallegos22]

I booked a trip on March 29th 2021.  I have since changed that trip and now have a travel fund.  I am being told that my fund expires on 9/8/21 because part of my original trip was booked with a travel fund.  I paid $386.00 off my credit card and $10.50 in travel funds.  Has anyone else experience this?  I could see if they deducted the $10.50 but to take the rest of it does not seem right. I do not feel I should have to pay $100.00 per person to covert it when I just booked the flight in March.

[TheMiddleSeat]

Yes, when you combine travel funds or travel funds and cash to book then cancel, the resulting travel fund is the total combined value and takes on the earliest expiration date of any of the travel funds used originally.

From https://www.southwest.com/faq/travel-funds

"If you book with a combination of these payments, the travel fund adopts the expiration date of the fund that expires soonest."

--TheMiddleSeat

[chgoflyer]

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@angelgallegos22 wrote:

I booked a trip on March 29th 2021.  I have since changed that trip and now have a travel fund.  I am being told that my fund expires on 9/8/21 because part of my original trip was booked with a travel fund.  I paid $386.00 off my credit card and $10.50 in travel funds.  Has anyone else experience this?  I could see if they deducted the $10.50 but to take the rest of it does not seem right. I do not feel I should have to pay $100.00 per person to covert it when I just booked the flight in March.

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Yes, unfortunately that's how it works. Whenever you apply travel funds (or a voucher) to a new booking, that new booking takes on the earliest expiration date of any of the funds/vouchers applied. This information is shown to you when you apply the funds, but many people overlook it.

[bec102896]

This happened to me once when I was new to travel and this is how an agent on Twitter explained it to me

If you were going to make brownies and you combined the ingredients and mixed them when you realized oops I put an extra egg you can't take the 1 extra egg out of the mixed brownies. 

So in this case once you combined the $10 with your $300 you aren't able to separate the 2 amounts once since they have already been combined and the rule is the reservation will take on the earliest expiration date of funds you apply to a reservation. 

-Blake

[gsking]

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@bec102896 wrote:

This happened to me once when I was new to travel and this is how an agent on Twitter explained it to me

If you were going to make brownies and you combined the ingredients and mixed them when you realized oops I put an extra egg you can't take the 1 extra egg out of the mixed brownies. 

So in this case once you combined the $10 with your $300 you aren't able to separate the 2 amounts once since they have already been combined and the rule is the reservation will take on the earliest expiration date of funds you apply to a reservation. 

-Blake

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And the oldest ingredient affects the freshness of the batch. 

I try hard to avoid this issue,  but it's difficult.   Risk funds expiring, or risk adding new funds to them and then having THOSE expire.    

Sometimes I've purchased flights with new funds if they were more likely to be canceled. 

And this time I bought a cheaper flight to avoid adding funds to expiring funds,  and now I have to spend more to change to a better time.   Oops.  I gambled and lost. 

Bummer, yes.   But still much better than the alternative.