I never knew this...
Can you explain? I'm waiting for November 10th so I can book our May 23rd-June 1st trip so I would love to know why.
Thank you!!
Carla
I'm sure others can explain it better, but here's a list from Flyer Talk:
1. If a better fare becomes available in one direction but the fare increased in the other direction it's easy to use Change Reservation or rebook the half that went down. There's no risk of disturbing the good fare on the other half of your trip.
2. If one seat opens at a discount fare you can grab it for one passenger using Change Reservation or rebooking (this argues for separate reservations for each passenger)
3. Points post after each direction rather than only after your return trip.
4. Smaller ticketless fund amounts make it less likely that you will commingle a large amount of new funds with a small early-expiring ticketless fund amount. That would result in early expiration for all your new funds.
5. If you decide to replace one direction of a paid ticket with a standard award booking, or vice versa, it's much easier to do.
6. If you cancel a multi-person booking the ticketless funds on the record locator are separated into invisible buckets, one for each name. This complication does not arise if you originally gave each person his own reservation. Don't underestimate the hassle of dealing with multiple names on one canceled reservation.
7. All of the above allow you to change what you need to change without phoning Southwest. Once a phone agent modifies a reservation, that reservation cannot be further modified online. You are locked into phone call mode. Online, the reservation can only be canceled and rebooked.
One of the more important takeaways is to always do a Southwest fare search for 1 person -- that way you will know what the lowest fare available is. If you immediately try to book for 4 people, you may see the lowest fare is $250, but that may be because there are only three seats at $202. In that case, you should break your reservation up into three people and one person -- buying the three $202 flights and only paying for 1 $250. The fare search will show you the lowest uniform fare for a party of your size.