reservations, flights, and point allocation

[Jperiod]

We have a trip to VGC then Aulani in December, but southwest hasn't released the December schedule yet and apparently won't do that until June 20th! Based on their current schedule, we can't get a flight home on a Saturday unless Southwest adds more routes. So our plan B is to shorten our VGC reservation and do Aulani fri-fri instead of sat-sat as we originally wanted.

I currently have sun-sat at VGC reserved with banked 2018 points and fri-fri at aulani reserved with 2019 and OTU points.

I noticed I can reallocate 2018/2019 points myself through modifying the reservation, but does anyone have experience when OTU points are involved? If I cancel that friday night at VGC, I'd like to reallocate my aulani reservation to use up the banked 2018 and OTU points first.

To make matters more complicated, I'm nervous about not being able to add on a friday night at aulani should Southwest add a saturday flight. I had thought about borrowing points from 2020 to reserve 8th night at aulani just in case (fri-sat). But if I end up getting the flight and modifying the reservation to sat-sat, will it use my borrowed 2020 and OTU points before the 2019 points? Then I can bank those leftover 2019 points.

I asked the DVC guide and she wasn't sure. And we can't fly anything but southwest because we're using 2 companion passes.

 

[crvetter]

If you booked everything at 7 months you should be able to apply the OTUP to your other stay (this is my understand); however, if the reservation you want to apply them to, once freed up, was made with any sort of home resort advantage you can not. MS will have to handle that allocation for you as the online will not.

As for order of points MS should be able to reallocate the points (same as you can do by the modify function) so banked points, borrowed points, current use year points. I would assume if they can reallocate the OTUP to the non cancelled reservation it would go before banked.

I will add if you shorten the VGC stay that should still use some if not all the OTUP. MS should make that work.

 

[Jperiod]

Aulani was booked at 7 months. If that's the one I'm adjusting, will there have to be open rooms left in order for them to reallocate?

 

[crvetter]

Aulani was booked at 7 months. If that's the one I'm adjusting, will there have to be open rooms left in order for them to reallocate?

The only rule really for reallocating is that you can circumvent home resort priority.

So if you cancel the one night at VGC you will free up points. If that reservation is completely banked points those would be freed up banked points. Then if you call DVC they should be able to apply those points to Aulani because Aulani was booked at 7 months there is no points used that had home resort priority. Then you should free up some current use year points. This also requires all points to be from the same membership.

I would definitely call back MS to help an advisor should be able to help. Explain you want to modify the VGC booking which will free up 2018 points that you want to then add to the Aulani reservation to free up 2019 points that can be banked. The person you talked to might not have known how to do it but it can be done for sure.

As you highlighted this is easy to do online except I have no idea how the OTUP work. I assume they wouldn’t show up when you go to do the modification this MS probably has to be involved.

 

[DebbieB]

Did they change the date? I thought it was May 29th.

 

[Spartan86]

Did they change the date? I thought it was May 29th.

Yes. Pushed it out again.

https://www.southwest.com/air/flight-schedules/