Southwest Travel Funds (Combining)

[billjanssen]

This will be a suggestion for discussion.  I certainly appreciate that Southwest gives us the ability to rebook flights at a lower advertised fare and that it is the consumer who must keep track of the credit. It would however be appreciated if they would allow within their system an opportunity to combine multiple travel credits into one. There is a long and convoluted way to achive this, but it would seem simple to be able to input multipe confirmation numbers and generate one travel credit option to source from.

[dfwskier]

Hello.

Since this is a customer to customer forum which cannot act on suggestions such as yours, it would seem appropriate to have you send your suggestion directly to Southwest. Details on how to do this are on the top left of Southwest's contact us webpage

https://www.southwest.com/contact-us/contact-us.html?clk=GFOOTER-CUSTOMER-CONTACT-US

[DancingDavidE]

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@billjanssen wrote:

This will be a suggestion for discussion.  I certainly appreciate that Southwest gives us the ability to rebook flights at a lower advertised fare and that it is the consumer who must keep track of the credit. It would however be appreciated if they would allow within their system an opportunity to combine multiple travel credits into one. There is a long and convoluted way to achive this, but it would seem simple to be able to input multipe confirmation numbers and generate one travel credit option to source from.

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And where the "long way" to do this involves a lot of steps and you end up with an expiration date for the whole thing that is the same as the shortest of the funds, it might make sense to allow passengers to voluntarily give up the longer duration for the simplicity.

The caveat that I see would be people doing this, then changing their mind and calling back "hey, this isn't what I wanted to do" where the long process is very clear at multiple steps along the way what you are doing. So it would be doable, but the new simple process would have to be very clear in the same way what was being accomplished and what the trade-off was.

[TAS467]

What is the convoluted way to do this?  I have 14 credits totaling over $350. My new ticket is $250.  I found out the hard way SWA only allows 2 credits to be applied to a new ticket.  So even though I have enough credits, I can't use them all.  I still have to pay OVER $100 for the ticket which is ridiculous. Already escalated twice to customer care.  They just quote what their policy is and is not willing to do anything. They won't combine into a gift card or voucher or provide any other creative solution.

[dfwskier]

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@TAS467 wrote:

What is the convoluted way to do this?  I have 14 credits totaling over $350. My new ticket is $250.  I found out the hard way SWA only allows 2 credits to be applied to a new ticket.  So even though I have enough credits, I can't use them all.  I still have to pay OVER $100 for the ticket which is ridiculous. Already escalated twice to customer care.  They just quote what their policy is and is not willing to do anything. They won't combine into a gift card or voucher. 

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Take 3 travel funds and buy any ticket. Cancel that ticket. Voila you have turned 3 travel funds into one. Do it a second time and you will have turned 6 travel funds into 2.

Are the 2 funds together worth $250? If so, buy your ticket. If not do ti a third time and then use the 3 new travel funds to buy your ticket.

You may use a max of three forms of payment to buy any ticket.

WARNING: when you combine travel funds the resultant new travel fund will have the earliest expiration  date of the combined funds.   

If you have 14 travel credits, you must travel a lot. In the future you might want to use them through the year instead of letting them accumulate.

[TAS467]

THANK YOU!!! That worked. Entire round trip ticket was paid for with Travel Funds vs partially paying out of pocket.

It's odd but this was only 3 tickets - 1 ticket had 6 fare decreases (ranging from $5 to $16 each time), another ticket had 6 fare decreases (ranging from $9 to $120 each time), and the 3rd ticket had 2 decreases at $15 each.

I live in Flordia so fares are very price sensitive.