Greetings from Southwest Wi-Fi and the middle seat of a packed WN2852 ATL-DCA. My wife and I purchased Early Bird Check In two months ago for our flight home from Atlanta this evening when we made our reservation. As a result, I figured we would check in at the kiosk and get our boarding passes when we got to Hartsfield this afternoon. When we arrived at the airport, the kiosk spat out security documents indicating we were not checked in, and that we had to go to the gate to get a boarding pass with boarding position so we did...and got boarding positions C26 and C27.

I asked what happened to our EBCI, and pulled up the email from when EBCI was purchased. Apparently at some point Southwest did a minor schedule change to our reservation and changed the flight number. The gate agent told me that is what canceled our EBCI and we'd have to apply for a refund from Southwest to get our $25 back.

Does this make sense to any of you experts on here? Do I really need to proactively repurchase EBCI if Southwest does a schedule change after booking? And do I really need to apply for a refund when Southwest does this? Or is this something that should automatically refund to my credit card?

UPDATE: after reviewing my credit card transactions for the past two months, I see I was never refunded for the EBCI that was canceled when WN changed the schedule time of my flight/flight number.

Just curious, thanks in advance for any experiences/insight!