If this is what SWA has become, I will never fly them again. I have had many airlines, including SWA in the past 15 years, work to help my family when my medically fragile kid ended up in the hospital and our flight needed to be cancelled and rescheduled. We have had to travel over 30 times to children’s hospitals all over the USA for surgeries. We were always running into extended hospitalizations due to complicated recoveries from surgery and infection. We could always count on airlines helping us out, as families in special circumstances. Sad that things have changed. Glad to see so many people on this forum running to defend SWA latest position for families such as mine (sarcasm). I hope you don’t find yourself in my situation, throwing away $1,300 or more every time your child’s hospitalization causes a cancellation in flights (sincerity). Not everyone can afford to pay for refundable flights each time. I am sure others have already found out what I just did about this community, it is filled with SWA employees or fanboys. I will not post here again.
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I wanted to share my experience dealing with Southwest’s customer service and the circumstances that led to my needing to contact them. Last Christmas holiday, I planned to travel to see family with my three kids. My youngest kid is severely disabled. She has been hospitalized over 400 days of her 14 year life. She has had over 70 surgeries. Needless to say, taking a trip is not a small endeavor. Right before we were to leave, my daughter got a life threatening infection that put her in the hospital and then on home care with special IV antibiotics and anti fungals to fight her blood infection. I had to cancel our trip. I expected to use the travel credits the following year to hopefully repeat the trip over this years Christmas holiday. Unfortunately, when I tried to use the credits, I found out they expire in October, when I initially purchased the trip that I had to cancel. I called customer service on two occasions and each time they said that they were powerless to help me; but that I should email customer service and tell them what happened and they would have the power to extend my expiration date in order to book a duplicate Christmas time trip. Long story short, I contacted customer service via their email link on the web page. The first time I got a form response with no mention of my complaint, as if they didn’t read it. The second time I got a nice response that told me to email again and include proof of my daughter’s hospitalization. They said to reference the number in their email when submitting my third email. I sent them irrefutable copies of my insurance statements that showed the hospitalization and IV home care that followed. For their third response they completely ignored that information I sent and said, “sorry, you should use the miles before you October expiration date. I have faithfully travelled Southwest, along with my family of five for the last 15 years; and as an individual for my whole life, having grown up in Texas. I never thought I would ever get to this level of frustration with Southwest. There is no one to call that has the power to help me; and there is no guarantee when emailing that you will get someone who cares enough to actually do something to help. I and my family will never fly Southwest ever again. Even if I have to pay more, I will use another airline. I will share this story with everyone I know. Southwest used to have a heart. Now they are heartless.
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