Sounds like you had a pretty miserable and frustrating time. Yours is a fairly common story. A connecting flight gets cancelled. The passenger gets rescheduled, and then does not take the new flight, and the entire reservation gets cancelled. Yes, if you had cancelled the connection yourself, your return would have been intact. Yes it would have been nice if you had been warned. For the above reason, I almost never book RT tickets. Two one ways cost no more than one RT, although more effort is expended in the booking process. If I were you, I'd contact customer relations to plead your case and ask for a refund. I'd also ask for several hundred$ in travel vouchers for your trouble (Not sure if you care about that since you've said that you won't fly Southwest again). The phone number is 855-234-4654. If you get no satisfaction, you could write the CEO, Gary Kelley. You won't hear from him directly, but he'll refer to someone high enough in the food chain that you'll get a meaningful response. The address is P.O.Box 36647 Dallas, TX. 75235. Finally regarding the cancellations you ran into, the severe storm situation caused havoc in Chicago on the 27th. A friend flew out that evening incurring a 3 hour delay and several flights on the routing were cancelled. That also messed things up on the 28th. The weather that hit Chicago on the 27th moved to the east coast on then 28th further complicating things, casusing even more cancellations. Couple all of that with high load factors and it starts getting very difficult to reaccomodate rescheduled passengers on a timely basis.
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