06-09-2020
03:34 PM
I purchased 48 flights totaling $14,000 for events that my business was hosting in various parts of the country. All of my events were cancelled due to COVID 19 stay at home orders, including bans on large gatherings over 10 people and non essential travel. In turn, I cancelled the tickets because of the mandated stay at home orders as these events could not take place or we would be breaking the law. As I understand it, if I had waited until SW cancelled the flights, we would have received a refund but this wasn't known at the time. My events were early/mid March and everything was happening so fast we didn't want to risk losing the ticket all together so we cancelled rather than let the date come to pass. I would like a refund but I was only offered credits in the passengers name. I have no idea if we will have the same staff next year as some have already moved on to other opportunities. The very least SW could do is to put all of the funds in a business account for future use for any passenger I wish to book for. How do I protect these unused tickets if the passengers have the confirmation numbers? Allowing credits in the passengers name for a business like mine is worthless and quite frankly unfair. This is a world wide pandemic and my business should not be punished or suffer financial loss because of "SW policy". If SW truly wants to SERVE their customers and their community, they would consider a policy for small businesses so we can all survive this pandemic. My business is completely shut down yet SW is still operating, generating revenue and receiving a government bailout. It's incredibly frustrating to a small business like ours that a large corporation like SW would take such a stand.
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