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Travel Funds

Caseroo
Explorer C

When given a choice of which airline to use, I always choose Southwest.  I would like to ask Soutwest to review their travel funds policy.  I think that those funds should be up to the purchaser of the tickets on how they should be applied.  What if the passenger is a minor or unable to travel alone, they have flight credits that could go unused and the purchaser of the ticket may be able to use them.  I appreciate how liberal the policy is regarding changing a flight, however, for those credits to go to the passenger should not be Southwest' decision to make.  In researching this topic I see this is an ongoing concern and I would like to request the policy be reviewed.  

5 REPLIES 5

Re: Travel Funds

chgoflyer
Aviator A

That's a great suggestion, but it's more likely that the future will bring more restrictions on travel fund usage than less restrictions. (Southwest used to allow funds to be used by anyone, but stopped that in 2011.)

Re: Travel Funds

LindseyD
Retired Community Manager

Thanks for the suggestion, @Caseroo, and thanks for posting in the Southwest Community. Though we don't have any plans to amend our policy on travel funds, we appreciate hearing your perspective, and we will always take Customer feedback into consideration. 

 

 

Re: Travel Funds

tenminutemile
Explorer C

Perhaps you could at least allow travel funds to be used if they are not expired at time of booking. I just learned the hard way that I can't use my travel funds, which don't expire for 5 more months, for a ticket I'm booking today, because the flight is in 6 months. Not cool. 

Re: Travel Funds

dfwskier
Aviator A

@tenminutemile wrote:

Perhaps you could at least allow travel funds to be used if they are not expired at time of booking. I just learned the hard way that I can't use my travel funds, which don't expire for 5 more months, for a ticket I'm booking today, because the flight is in 6 months. Not cool. 


 

Well, that is the rule applied by just about every airline that I know of - not just Southwest.  At least Souhwest does not chage you $200 or more just to use every single travel fund. Other airlines do.

 

Why not book an earlier flight to someplace. I think you said you have 5 months til the funds expire.

Re: Travel Funds

DancingDavidE
Aviator A

@tenminutemile wrote:

Perhaps you could at least allow travel funds to be used if they are not expired at time of booking. I just learned the hard way that I can't use my travel funds, which don't expire for 5 more months, for a ticket I'm booking today, because the flight is in 6 months. Not cool. 


I'm not sure of all the motivations that lead up to the fact that the airlines don't want (can't?) have reservations that far into the future between accounting, security, profit, etc.

 

Southwest has offered unofficially to convert an expired travel fund into a voucher for a fee, if you end up in this scenario you'd get a six-month extension to use the value of the funds, minus the fee which has been reported at $100 recently. 

 

This applies per Travel Fund, so you wouldn't want to have this happen to a bunch of small travel funds, it wouldn't be worth converting them if the value is not much more than $100.

 

One downside of this is that you can't get the voucher until the funds actually have expired, so you can't plan as far out to use it, and it may or may not be offered or the fee may increase by the time the expiration rolls around.

 

 

 

 

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