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Southwest Airlines Community

Travel Funds?

Berlin77
Explorer C

 SWA has stopped extending travel fund dates! Purchase tickets last October for April 2020 and had to postpone due to covid until this Oct 2020 but had to now cancel/postpone again until Nov 2021 but cannot!   Would happily use the funds Nov/Dec 2020 but they wont let me!  

 

Covid is not over so why was the extension policy stopped?  I have some credit under same confirmation # that has date of 2022 but now its 2020...

5 REPLIES 5

Re: Travel Funds?

dfwskier
Aviator A
Solution

This topic comes up a lot in the community.

 

Southwest extended all travel funds created (reservations cancelled) between 3/1/20 and 9/7/20. New expiration date 9/7/22. That policy was in effect from roughly May thru September 7, 2020.

 

Many people realized that if they had expiration dates that did not qualify, tht they could simply use those travel funds to buy a new ticket and then cancel that ticket before 9/7/20 - giving them a new expiration date of 9/7/22.

 

Since the virus is still causing people to change flight plans, perhaps the airline will come up with another plan to extend expiration dates, but nothing has been announced yet.

 

Southwest does have an unofficial policy of letting customers with expired travel funds use those funds to "buy" vouchers. Cost is $100/travel fund. So if you have multiple travel funds, each would cost $100 but is you combine those funds to buy one ticket and then cancel that ticket, then the fee would be $100.

 

The window to convert an expired travel fund  to a voucher is six months from the date of the expiration of the travel fund. The resultant voucher would be good for 6 months

Re: Travel Funds?

sharonrose
Explorer B

So again they have secret ways to game the system and get around their outrageous refusal to honor travel funds?  Southwest received MILLIONS in government bailout funds -- those came from TAXPAYERS MONEY.  Now they want to keep even more of our money by cheating people out of their travel funds.  There is no logical, ethical, or reasonable explanation for denying people their travel funds in the midst of a worldwide pandemic.  They did not offer me this option when I wrote to them.  I received an anonymous form letter citing a bunch of possible reasons why they want to steal my money.  This is corporate GREED of the worst kind.  Individually one-by-one stealing money from their loyal customers.  This makes me sick.

Re: Travel Funds?

chgoflyer
Aviator A

If you think the option suggested is unethical, then perhaps you shouldn't take advantage of it.

 

I understand you're angry. And as I posted earlier, I absolutely understand why. Again, I feel it's unfortunate that Southwest isn't addressing customers with situations such as yours. 

 

Please keep in mind that the people here, the ones making suggestions that could potentially help you recover most of your funds, are just customers like you. We are not Southwest. Your anger may be real, but it's definitely misplaced. Consider directing it at Southwest proper, through any of the contact methods that have been mentioned earlier in any of these threads.

 

 

Re: Travel Funds?

SWFlyer007
Aviator C

@sharonrose Scan the letter and post it, then I will give thought to this.  I've complained to SWA at least 10 times, I've never received anything without a person connected to the end of it.  Appreciate it, thanks.

Re: Travel Funds?

trix71
Explorer C

How do you go about "buying" a voucher with your expired/expiring travel funds? Do you have to call? My son has some from cancelled flights due to hospitalizations in 2020 and of course we have not been able to travel with Covid either... don't want to lose $250+ in funds if I can avoid it somehow. Thanks for your help!