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According to southwest.com, on November 19, 2012 the bookable window will be extended through August 9, 2013. If recent trends continue, the booking window extension will happen pre-dawn for most or all of us, between 5 and 6 AM Central Time and there will be no DING! alert.

In other news:

1. It's a great time to milk Chase Bank for Rapid Rewards points. You can get 50k points for spending $2000 in the first 3 months on any of 3 Southwest cards: Premier Business, Premier Personal, and Plus Personal. The Plus cards are blue; the Premier cards are black. This offer is at https://creditcards.chase.com/a1/southwest/2ffhero

Your best bet is probably to wait until after your December statement date to start using the new card(s). Then all your points will post in 2013 and count toward earning a Companion Pass that will be good through 2014.

2. Chase Bank has added an AirTran Visa card to its offerings. You can now get 32 AirTran credits, which are transferable at will into 2 Southwest Standard Awards, for spending $2000 in the first 3 months on this card. AirTran's home page gives the application link: https://creditcards.chase.com/a1/air...2loyaltycorner

There's another interesting twist to this offer: AirTran credits are transferable from one person to another for $19 each, or for free if you are an Elite member of AirTran's program. This could be more cost-effective than buying Rapid Rewards points to top off a family member's Rapid Rewards account. See http://www.aplusrewards.com/buy_or_give_credits.aspx

3. There was a 1-day sale last Friday, one week before Black Friday. There will probably be other sales some time between Thanksgiving Day and the following Monday. Check southwest.com over the holiday weekend. These sales are not being announced on Ding, which continues to be sadly neglected by Southwest. If a sale is really hot, we will newsflash it to people who subscribe to this thread.

To be notified by email when this a new post is added to this newsflash thread, click on Thread Tools in the blue bar above. Select "Subscribe to this Thread" from the pull-down menu and click. Select "Instant notification by Email" and "Add Subscription". If you need to establish or change your email address for Flyertalk, select "MyFlyerTalk" at the left of the blue bar, then "Edit Email & Password".

4. Southwest has adopted an even more generous Customer of Size (COS) policy. If you need a second seat you can now get it at the gate for free, just by asking. Read all about it at http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/south...-walk-ups.html

5. If you have Awards that expire in less than 11 months, don't forget to freshen them with the WN/FL transfer two-step.

6. FlyerTalk's home page, flyertalk.com, was reformatted on November 6. Check it out.

7. TalkBoard elections are happening now. You can vote through November 21, 2012. Since I am not running this year and I am term limited out next year (FWIW, I was the one who wrote the term limit proposal and managed to corral 6 votes for it), I feel comfortable copying our Community Director's announcement here: