Thanks for the feedback guys.

Yea, not keen on sending anything through snail mail. They can easily claim it got lost and paper forms are prone to data entry human error. Stupid. It's designed to put you through hoops, to inconvenience, and discourage you from holding onto your gift cards. No reason why the default status can be to keep the gift cards as status quo, or at least have a webpage option to acknowledge your ownership electronically.

My 4 gift cards totaled $400. Just bought a flight worth $412, to see what would happen if I just cancel the flight. It was a main cabin flight, and I noticed during the leg selection phase, the webpage mentioned "cancel for full e-credit" which I wasn't sure what they meant exactly at the time. But during canceling, I actually noticed there were two options they present - refund to original forms of payment, or, put everything on 1 e-credit that lasts a year and explicitly tells you the expiration date (this is what they meant).

Just went with the latter, as 1)will most likely use it within a year, 2)there's no doubt I won't lose the gift card values (at least for a year, in which case I can just repeat what I did if need be), and 3)losing $12 in cash for store credit isn't the end of the world.