Until this summer, re-using Ticketless Travel Funds (TTF's) was tedious but straightforward: They were applied to your purchase in the order you entered them on the payment page. Times have changed, often making TTF's harder to get rid of. This thread is dedicated to explaining how the system works and how you can work around the limitations.
In the new system, there are two main categories of funds: "unused Ticketless Travel tickets" (uTTt's) and Ticketless Travel Funds (TTF's). A uTTt is any reservation that has been canceled and from which no funds have yet been taken. It's a virgin PNR, and Southwest's computers will always choose the virgin first. Can you blame them?
This means that a later-expiring uTTt will be tapped before an earlier-expiring TTF, even if you entered the TTF as a payment source before the uTTt. This is the main source of trouble with the new system.
LUV vouchers and gift cards have even lower priority than TTFs. An earlier-expiring LUV voucher has a lower priority than a later-entered, later-expiring TTF. Gift cards likely work the same as LUV vouchers in this respect. I don't yet know whether they have the same priority, or whether an earlier-expiring LUV voucher has a lower priority than a later-entered, later-expiring gift card.
Here's a common example of where the new system causes trouble. Suppose a $40 Ding fare appears on five $50 trips you booked earlier. You cancel your $50 bookings and apply the funds to your Ding purchases. With the old system, this was a relatively simple process. Start with the first one, and you have $10 left over. Use that $10 plus the next $50 for the second booking, leaving $20. And so on. At the end you only have one leftover TTF worth $50.
The new system refuses to cooperate with you this way. Your second booking will grab the virgin $50 and leave you with two $10 TTF's. When you are done you will have five $10 TTF's.
"So what?" you say. That doesn't look like a problem. Under the old system, it would not have been a problem. Under the new system, look what happens. You have five $10 TTF's. The maximum number of payment sources per reservation is 4, including a credit card if you need to use one. Therefore you cannot buy any ticket more than $40 with your TTF's. If you try to use 4 TTF's plus a uTTt, the system will greedily tap the uTTt for the full amount and leave you with yet another TTF on top of the ones you already had.
It seems as if the very best you can do to eliminate your TTF's is to use a uTTt of just the right amount plus 3 TTF's to "buy up" to a higher fare than your uTTt. This is the core of a technique I will explain below.
In summary, refaring down generates small TTF's that are very hard to use. "Buying up" can use those small TTF's. Therefore you should always try to use TTF's to supplement your unused ticket when you are buying up.
One other technique deserves discussion. Taking a small amount of funds out of an uTTt will change it into TTF and thus lower its priority so it can be tapped last in a new reservation. You might think that booking a $2.50 Companion Pass or award ticket is a great idea for this. Beware. If you decide not to use that $2.50 ticket, the funds are likely to be lost, viewable but unusable. You will then need to call Customer Service, which normally requires 10 or 20 attempts and several minutes on hold. After you explain the problem to them they will refund your money, but you will have wasted 20 minutes of your time and probably $10 of cost to Southwest. You might as well just kiss the $2.50 goodbye instead.
By now, getting any use out of TTF's is probably sounding an awful lot like a Catch-22. If you have patience, persistence, and if you don't assign any value at all to the time you spend on this, you can successfully book a ticket using a set of small TTF's. I have done it, partly out of ignorance of the difficulty and partly to find out if it could be done.
Here are the steps:
1. Identify TTF's and at least one uTTt with similar expiration.
2. Add up the values of one uTTt and 3 TTF's. Find a fare, any fare, that comes close to this total but not over it. Buy the ticket using these funds. Do NOT cancel the reservation. You now have one larger uTTt and two fewer TTFs than you started with.
3. Add up the values of the new uTTt and 3 more TTF's. Find a fare, any fare, that comes close to this total but not over it. Using the Change Reservation feature, change the ticket to the new itinerary using these funds. Do NOT cancel the reservation. You now have one larger uTTt and four fewer TTF's than you started with.
4. Repeat step 3 as necessary to use up all your TTF's, leaving one fractional remainder. The hard part is finding fares suitable for a small buy-up. Sometimes you need to look at Anytime short-haul, sometimes discounted long-haul.
5. Now it is finally time to cancel your reservation and start making bookings for what you intend to fly. It will likely take you an hour or more to reach this step.
6. You need to "break" the large uTTt and make it a TTF. The easiest way is to buy your first trip with only the uTTt.
7. The leftovers of the uTTt are now TTF. For the second trip and all other trips, you can go back to the old way of re-using funds, since you have only TTF's. First apply your small TTF's and then the large one. You will now have only one TTF and life will be simple, at least until the next time you see a $5 price drop a Ding fare.
If you have read this far, you probably won't be using Ding to fe-fare your trips downward for small amounts any more. It's just not worth the bother.
Southwest is the only airline that lets us re-use funds this freely, so we don't really have a right to complain. But that has never stopped us.
Complexity gives FT'ers the advantage over other customers, but this is plane nuts. I really would like just one new web page at southwest.com allowing us to combine several TTF's into one. That one web page would make this whole problem disappear.