Rebooking Southwest Tickets

[placeela]

Everyone here seems to know so much about flying Southwest so I am hoping you can give me some guidance. I booked tickets yesterday for a flight in November. Now on the website today it says if you sign up with your rapid rewards that new bookings get double points for travel over my dates. So, is it hard to cancel the tickets I have and then rebook them to get the double miles? Would this be counted as a "new booking"? Just trying to decide if it is worth the hassle. It would give each of us about 2500 more points. Thanks for your help!!!

 

[leebee]

It's easy as pie to cancel and rebook on Southwest. Log into your account and click the appropriate button: "change flight" or "cancel flight." The website will walk you through it. I would think, in this case, you'd have to cancel your existing reservation and make new ones to be considered as a new purchase for the additional RR points.

However... a couple of things to consider. First, is the fare you paid yesterday still available for today, or has it gone up? If you cancel and rebook, you'll pay the new fare. Sometimes I check this by checking the travel dates I am interested in and clicking the toggle for 8 adults. I figure, if they have that fare available for at least 8 people, it'll stand up to the time it takes for me to make my new reservation. You might also want to cancel and rebook the flights separately; yours first, then your spouse's, just to make sure you can get at least one of the tickets at your existing fare (does this make sense?).

Also... did you book with rewards points or cash? If it's with points, it's absolutely no problem; they will put the points back into your account and even hold the $10 you paid in security fees to apply to another reservation. If you paid in cash, there's a caveat: They will make the changes and put the cash in an account for you, but you need to book/use that cash within a year of the date you made the original reservation. It doesn't sound like it'll be an issue for you (based on the date you made the reservation and your discussion of getting more points) but I just wanted to mention this for accuracy/completeness.

 

[placeela]

Thanks so much for walking me through it! I am always so afraid they will run out of tickets or the price will change. The price was the same and I just cancelled and rebooked with no change in price. It was pretty easy. Thanks again for your help! I am pretty excited to get twice the miles, especially since I was mad how much I had to pay for the tickets. It helps to take some of the sting away Thanks again!

 

[leebee]

Excellent! I just rebooked fares for my MIL and SIL to come visit at Christmas, flying CLE-PWM round trip. I wasn't happy with the original fare, but bought it because it's on points, so not really OOP expense. I was VERY happy when SW ran a sale last week and I could rebook the itinerary- it saved me over 14,000 points!!