swaMark

I agree - this is quite the problem. Our 3 form of payment limitation per ticket (including cc) is especially apparent with travel funds generated from points booking cancellations. It bothers me every time I book, and I’m in your camp as I commute a lot on revenue tickets so I can be close to my family and still work for Southwest. And I’m the guy who works directly on the roadmap with our stakeholders so the pain cuts much more deeply.

I have good news and bad news. Good news is that we just moved our entire system that hosts our residual travel funds onto a brand new modern tech stack called SWA Bank. It’s funny you bring up funds as the cutover happened on Friday morning and billions of funds were moved overnight. It was very smooth and should make improvements even easier in the future as the tech stack is so much more modern. The bad news is that changing this limitation within booking or change takes many different groups as the limitation is due to some rules deep within the tech stack and they go all the way from our website, apps, across our middleware, and deep into our reservation system. They are in there to actually reduce complexity as each additional form of payment or type of FOP allowed during a booking or change exponentially increases testing complexity, maintenance costs, and design costs.

I like idea though of a travel fund merge tool. With this new SWA Bank system that may be something we could now explore more easily.

This summer we are standing up a Trip Support team to focus on things exactly like this that prevent self service or drive frustration. We already stood up a brand new Day of Travel agile team that brings together our web, app, middleware, and res system teams to improve
that experience. When Bob talks about our desire to modernize our experiences, these new teams are one component of that goal. I’m really excited about our investment in these areas, as our Cohearts. Was just in a big kickoff for our new Day of Travel team on Friday afternoon. So much fun to see everyone working together to solve problems in these spaces.

Admittedly that Trip Support team has a pretty big backlog too. Things like adding passengers, removing passengers, allowing a change when a lap child is booked, allowing international boarding pass issuance via digital changes, group bookings, booking an unaccompanied minor on our mobile workflows, etc. Though, I will definitely add this to our Trip Support team backlog so the team can analyze the volume of occurrences and determine the priority of solving this problem over some of our other opportunity areas.

Hopefully all that context helps to share that we are committed to ongoing improvements in your experience. Can’t wait to share more about them in the future!

Thank you so much for bringing this up and thanks for you support of Southwest.