01-18-2017
05:43 PM
01-18-2017
05:43 PM
I discovered today, after nearly 8 cumulative hours of phone calls, that when one decides to use "unused travel funds" towards a purchase, that ALL funds used in that purchase will now have the expiration date of the oldest travel funds used. For example, I applied "unused travel funds" in the amount of $40 towards the purchase of a ticket which cost over $250. I did this in July, 2016, for travel in December, 2016. The $40 worth of unused travel funds was set to expire in December, 2016, shortly after my flight was planned for. As Southwest often does, their plane fares were going way up and down until October, when I noticed that the fare for the same December 2016 flight was now approximately half of what I had paid for it. So I canceled my flight and repurchased it, which should have put about $125 credit in my account. Then, I tried to book a new flight here in January, 2017, for a flight in March, 2017. Not only was I given no credit for the $40 (since it had expired in December, 2016), but Southwest told me that the entire $125 credit was now expired, because by co-mingling unused travel funds with the cash/credit card funds for the rest, the entire amount would now expire at the same time as the $40 unused funds. They told me they would do me a "favor" and extend my unused travel funds after subtracting $100 from the amount. So the bottom line is that anytime you try to use unused travel funds, you better go through with that ticket, because if you need to cancel for any reason, ALL of the funds will expire on the earliest date of any of the unused travel funds. I think this is terribly unfair, and completely misleading as this detail is nowhere within the Southwest policies that I could find. I can completely understand the oldest funds expiring "on time," but there is no reason to expire ALL funds when only some of the funds are expiring. And Southwest is very misleading about this!
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