I am using a Rapid Rewards Award for a flight tomorrow and my wife is flying on my companion pass. I just printed our boarding passes and got A21 and A23 for the first segment and A17 and A19 for the second. So far, so good. The bad news is that when I was looking at changing the flight several days ago I noticed that it is no longer possible to get the last seat on the plane with a Rapid Rewards Award. The number of seats available for Rapid Rewards Award use now seems to be very limited and in order to get the same flexibility that I had under the old system I will have to convert two Standard Awards into a Freedom Award. In effect, Southwest has doubled the number of segments for a "useful" award from 16 to 32. I fly Southwest exclusively because of the Rapid Reward program and think that this was a very disappointing improvement. I can understand all the other changes but this one is hitting me directly in the pocket book and I am surprised that it hasn't been discussed on this blog.
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