Travel OT for everyone. This is Southwest related and I have flown them so many times I should have realized this but wanted to share just in case any of you are not aware...
As you know you can basically rebook Southwest flights without a fee. You can also then use travel credits to reduce the cost of upcoming flights. All flights that you book and cancel basically have a 1 year clock on the funds to use but there is an exception and this is a very important nuance to understand.
If you use travel funds towards a flight then the new flight will adopt the expiration date of the credit in use. To put this into perspective, let's say you have ~$2 in travel credits expiring in August. You see a flight for August and think I'll go ahead and book that. Worst case scenario I know I'm going to book another flight before August 2022 so no real risk here. You then apply that $2 credit that is expiring in August 2021... and now that entire fare value has an expiration of August 2021, not August 2022.
Fortunately this hasn't burned us yet but we accidentally discovered it when changing a flight we have next week to a later time and saved ~$60/person. Couldn't figure out why the funds expired in August 2021 until I did some research and realized this nuance that I don't believe they describe very clearly when applying travel funds to your itinerary. No big deal really since being able to change for 'free' is basically a benefit relative to other airlines and was a good way to learn about the expiration deal.
There you have it. Hopefully this saves at least one person from making a massive mistake. We've been playing this game for a long time and now that I think about it I'm really shocked we haven't been burned at least once.
As you know you can basically rebook Southwest flights without a fee. You can also then use travel credits to reduce the cost of upcoming flights. All flights that you book and cancel basically have a 1 year clock on the funds to use but there is an exception and this is a very important nuance to understand.
If you use travel funds towards a flight then the new flight will adopt the expiration date of the credit in use. To put this into perspective, let's say you have ~$2 in travel credits expiring in August. You see a flight for August and think I'll go ahead and book that. Worst case scenario I know I'm going to book another flight before August 2022 so no real risk here. You then apply that $2 credit that is expiring in August 2021... and now that entire fare value has an expiration of August 2021, not August 2022.
Fortunately this hasn't burned us yet but we accidentally discovered it when changing a flight we have next week to a later time and saved ~$60/person. Couldn't figure out why the funds expired in August 2021 until I did some research and realized this nuance that I don't believe they describe very clearly when applying travel funds to your itinerary. No big deal really since being able to change for 'free' is basically a benefit relative to other airlines and was a good way to learn about the expiration deal.
There you have it. Hopefully this saves at least one person from making a massive mistake. We've been playing this game for a long time and now that I think about it I'm really shocked we haven't been burned at least once.
