diver858

I fail to see why anyone would care. The credit card reward program is likely paying full price to the travel agency to buy the ticket, so there should be no difference from WN's perspective. Credit card company is already out of the picture, travel agency may be the most put off, as they are playing an additional transaction without being paid. Worst case, they do not renew the contract with Citi, who finds another one.

hokiegl

This is the biggest unkown to me. The Travel Agency is getting paid by the CC to service the rewards. They are just a pass through. When I cancel a ticket on soutwest.com and bank the credit, does the travel agency even get notified? Do they get any kind of penalty or refund? Does anyone her know how those arrangements are made?

I am certain that in what I am proposing no-one is "losing" out. Everyone is getting paid what they are owed. All that is happening, is that I am time shifting my NW purchase. Does NW really care if I give them a $5,000 loan for a year? Even better, there is a high chance that I won't even use the full $5,000 and they get a windfall.

joshua362

I highly doubt it, once they arrange the ticketing and you get a non refundable WN PNR, the agency is out of the picture. If you are constantly refunding, that would be different.

I used to do this all the time with a (horrible) corporate travel agency, it would just be easier to buy some tickets in advance and move them around as my travel dictated. IIRC, I couldn't "change flights" them as the record was tainted (locked out) but could "cancel flights" and have the entire PNR $ to use up.

Is this limited time only deal? If not, why are you in such a rush to lock up 20+ flights to use in a year? That is a lot of flights.

hokiegl

Bingo! That's exactly my experience. Good, so it looks like this is a common practice and Southwest does not care. I'm going think more about this and see I could use this to may advantage. The reason I want to do this? Well, I want to be able to churn this CC and therefore, I would need to liquidate my points quickly. I think Southwest offers a great avenue for that. I have 7 family members, so I would buy each of us $1000 SW "credits" for example and then do with them as we wish later on. (We tend to travel last minute)

magman4x4

this, please...

joshua362

I don't think this is anything unusual or out of the ordinary and very similar to the hordes of folks here monitoring fares daily and repricing continuously. If anything it creates breakage for WN being a nightmare to account for every dollar.

I do this to use up budget funds in one fiscal year and push travel to the next year.

Mr. hokiegl, what currencies are you looking to use up and I have things like TY points I don't use either. Can you share the process?

NoStressHere

Chase Ultimate Rewards does a similar thing. If you use your points to buy through them (travel agency), each point is worth $1.25 towards travel. Same thing.

You can also get gift cards, usually 100 points gets $1.00

You just have to decide if this is the best use of your points.

We prefer to transfer them to airlines for expensive business class tickets getting much more value for them. Transfer 50,000 and get a $3,000 flight. Those points are now worth $.06 each.


You have to decide the best use of your points.

Buying and canceling multiple flights is looking for trouble. Somewhere in the small print you will something that will trip you up. Like buying something you have no intention of using. Do one or two a year and it looks like normal travel. Anything else....