Originally Posted by
marlin
I want to make a dummy booking for May and change it to June (if changes are allowed in the future per this thread). However, I must go in June on exact dates.
If I make a real booking for the real dates in June, would I have to cancel that first, in order to make the dummy changes to June as I would like?
I've been booking the exact flights I want (or a significantly cheaper but acceptable set) as well as a dummy booking within a couple of weeks of each. I make sure to leave a couple of days in between any flights I book, to prevent cancellation by the algorithm. You can have duplicate flights booked short term, but one or the other is at risk of cancellation if you leave them both overnight.
Really, though, very few of my bookings were at price points that were no longer available by the time the change window opened. I only do it this way because for a minute, Southwest had stopped allowing free changes for flights booked during the window.