Southwest Rapid Rewards - Need advice to get bumped tomorrow from fll

Southwest cancelled all flights to and from fll this afternoon (sunday). My family and i have 6 confirmed seats tomorrow (monday) on the 455pm flight from fll to denver. The flight suddenly went from available to sold out in all fare categories. If everyone who is confirmed shows up, by how many seats is the flight oversold approximately? We are willing to get bumped to tuesday morning, but only if we get at least 3 vouchers. Any advice on how i can maximize my bump opportunity? Should i call them and offer my seats up before hand? Or wait until i get to the gate? All flights on sunday were cancelled and im guessing all passengers were put on the monday flights. Does that mean that monday flights are oversold by a normal amount or abnormal amount? Will te lodge me in hotel on monday night if i am bumped? Thanks all!

WN will probably gladly move you, but it's unlikely you will receive anything other than a new BP in advance of the counter/gate.

Why would WN pay you comp so that it can put a SB pax on your flight in your place? If there are any IRROPS pax who need a seat on your flight, WN will board them once it knows how many pax have showed up at FLL. But, there's zero reason for WN to bump you to acommodate others.

In massive WX-related IRROPS there are all kinds of people scheduled to fly who won't make it to FLL in order to make it to DEN and so on. It's also entirely possible that your flight is wide open and WN has simply blocked all seats to acommodate pax in IRROPS.

Thanks for your reply. I doubt the flight is wide open since all sunday flights were cancelled and they had to put those pax somewhere, right? And im guessing they put them on monday flights. I agree they probably wont compensate me beforehand. You ask what's in it for them? I am willing to give up 6 seats for only 3 vouchers. Any idea if the flight is sold out, by how many is it likely oversold?

Any idea if the flight is sold out, by how many is it likely oversold?

Any U.S. airline will tell you if your flight is overbooked, if asked. They need not tell you by how many.

A few comments:

* Standard practice in weather situations like this is that people who were on the impacted flights are put on standby lists, and they keep rolling over on standby until the lists are emptied. The people at the beginning of the standby lists are usually not cleared onto flights this early, because Southwest benefits from waiting to see who cancels entirely, who calls in to make drastically different plans, etc., before clearing those who actually still want to travel, closer to the time of the flights. So even though you see Monday flights no longer being offered for sale, that doesn't mean that they are filled with confirmed bookings. My expectation is Southwest's operations team has manually removed availability to sell more tickets to preserve capacity. I could see that as an egalitarian action -- if I were in Florida and realized earlier this week that I possibly might get stranded, I would have booked an extra refundable ticket or two in order to be able to get out, but many people can't afford to do that. The media might enjoy running a human interest story in which they exclaim that while the wealthy could buy tickets and get out, the not-wealthy had to wait at the airport for days to get home.

* Most (all?) airlines won't take volunteers from people confirmed onto later flights in order to accommodate the people from the impacted flights, who are after all on standby lists. I think this is what you're hoping for. In this case, rather than taking you and your family as volunteers from your Sunday flight and paying you compensation to take a Monday flight, six of the people impacted would be accommodated in the six seats on the Monday flight that your party would have taken up. If this hurricane causes Southwest to only accommodate everybody by Tuesday, note that whether your family travels on Sunday or on Monday doesn't affect the time of the last standby passengers cleared. It only impacts that six of the impacted passengers would have gotten to travel on Sunday rather than Monday. While that's valuable for those six passengers, it's not a big deal to the media coverage.

* I would expect that Southwest's computer systems have a specific transaction for accommodating volunteers onto a later flight and accounting for such properly. While you may believe you're being generous in offering six Sunday flight seats for only three compensations, it's not clear that Southwest's computer systems would have a way for them to provide you with six confirmed seats on a Monday flight while only processing three volunteered seats and compensations. What you're offering would seem to be a rather rare case, and I would want Southwest's IT management to prioritize fixing other bugs and implementing other features....

* Southwest volunteer denied boarding compensation is in the form of dollar-denominated LUV vouchers whose values are based on the price of the ticket plus one of several possible fixed amounts depending on the amount of time that the volunteering passenger will be delayed arriving to their final destination. Just want to make sure that you don't think these are free round trip vouchers (akin to Rapid Rewards 1.x Standard Awards).

In massive WX-related IRROPS there are all kinds of people scheduled to fly who won't make it to FLL in order to make it to DEN and so on. It's also entirely possible that your flight is wide open and WN has simply blocked all seats to acommodate pax in IRROPS.

I had WN flight cancel on me one time and worried all other routings were going to be filled up quickly was very surprised when apparently a good deal of the travellers simply moved to either next day, another airport or airline. WN's no change fees can create some very dynamic changes to bookings last minute during IROPS.

Intense weather does pose a problem for businesses and homeowners since if they sustain any damage they'll have to deal with problems at home before leaving. Expensive hurricane insurance will do you little good if you leave town and don't attempt preservation of property. I bet there will be quite a few no shows... unless they've already cancelled.

All the fares were likely filled reprotecting passengers from today's cancellations. And if any left were sold (or changes). FLL isn't a long drive from RSW which is expected to get hit harder.... FLL is likely to be up and running quicker. Same goes for changing from TPA-MCO.

Thanks for your reply. I doubt the flight is wide open since all sunday flights were cancelled and they had to put those pax somewhere, right? And im guessing they put them on monday flights. I agree they probably wont compensate me beforehand. You ask what's in it for them? I am willing to give up 6 seats for only 3 vouchers. Any idea if the flight is sold out, by how many is it likely oversold?
As soon as the WX issue arose, I suspect that WN blocked all remaining seats knowing they'll be needed. However, from your perspective, even if WN would bump you for 3 vouchers, would that make up for 3-4 days at FLL on your own nickel?

Thanks for your reply. I doubt the flight is wide open since all sunday flights were cancelled and they had to put those pax somewhere, right? And im guessing they put them on monday flights. I agree they probably wont compensate me beforehand. You ask what's in it for them? I am willing to give up 6 seats for only 3 vouchers. Any idea if the flight is sold out, by how many is it likely oversold?
1. As soon as the WX arose, I suspect that WN blocked all empty seats and will assign those to SB's.

2. How does it help WN to pay you off to acommodate somebody else and then give you a seat on Tues AM, thereby bumping somebody else?

3. The poor slobs who lose their seats on cancelled flights due to WX, get zero compensation (voucher, hotel, food) and all they get is a SB list which rolls over.

If everyone who is confirmed shows up, by how many seats is the flight oversold approximately?

You really expect anyone from WN to post on here authorization levels? Thats not a realistic expectation my friend.

When I saw the thread title my first thought was: "Just show up early for the flight, have 5 drinks at the bar, then chat up the Ops Agent. If you need additional instruction, watch Airline or On The Fly."

:D