In the good old days, folks hated that they could accidentally book their companion on the wrong itinerary. In the bad new days, folks hate that they have no flexibility to book anything other than what the system dictates they can book, and that sometimes the system permanently or temporarily thinks they should not be able to book a companion at all.
This weekend I had
nsx show me the post-transition CP booking process; in return I showed him workarounds for some of the problems with the new system.
I witnessed a case where
nsx's future flight listing had no "add companion" link even though he did not have a companion booked on the flight. Most folks would resort to a phone call to book the companion in those circumstances, but it turned out there is a fairly easy workaround that allows booking the companion online. When an "add companion" link was available, the URL looked something like:
Code:
http://www.southwest.com/account/rapidrewards/bookCompanion.html?recordLocator=ABC123&ss=0&disc=...
The URL above works perfectly well if you remove everything after ABC123. Furthermore, it is customizable if you simply replace ABC123 with the PNR of the CP holder's flight. So
nsx was able to complete a test booking for his companion on a PNR that was a half-flown RT. Amazingly enough, the system had no problem adding the companion to just the unflown portion of the itinerary.
A more common frustration is that you want to book your companion immediately after you book your flight, rather than waiting around 5, 10, 15, or ??? minutes for your new reservation to show up in your future flight listing. Tested and confirmed: no problemo. Simply open a new tab, paste the pro-forma
add CP URL above, copy the new PNR from the confirmation page and paste it over
ABC123, hit Enter, and off you go.
To make it easier, you can bookmark this
pro-forma CP booking link (use the right-click context menu to bookmark the link) so it is handy whenever you need it.
But wait, there's more!
In Firefox you can assign a keyword such as (addCp, or even just cp) to the pro-forma bookmark above, so that you can access it very quickly just by typing cp (or your chosen keyword) in the AwesomeBar. ^
(To see the dialog pictured above, you have to first bookmark the link, then edit the bookmark properties. The easiest way to get there is via the Recently Bookmarked item on the Bookmarks menu.)
But wait, there's
even more!
In Firefox you can replace the ABC123 with %s to indicate that a substitution should be made for the PNR. So you bookmark
this substitution version of the above URL, (right click context menu again), add the keyword as per above, then when you want to immediately add a companion booking to your just completed reservation, simply follow these steps:
- Copy the PNR;
- Open a new tab (precaution, not strictly necessary);
- Type cp Ctrl-v[Enter] (that is: cp[space]/paste the PNR/hit Enter);
- Proceed as usual to complete the CP booking.
Using copy and paste of course isn't necessary, it is just the most efficient approach for many of us. Some folks will find it easier to look at the PNR and retype it instead of copying and pasting it.
I didn't have a chance to dive into the guts of the new purchase confirmation page for this project, but once I do that it should be easy to create a GreaseMonkey user script to add an "Add Companion" link to the purchase confirmation page.