Just a quick story from the "how nice would it be..." files:

In March my wife and I are heading down to Philly for a get together with friends that are coming from Jersey and DC and some other places around. We decided we'd fly down so we didn't have to make the 6.5 hour drive from MHT to PHL. Usually I'd take a US flight so I could get UA miles and because it goes nonstop from MHT to PHL. But we started looking at flight times and the US flights didn't really work for us. So I looked around and saw Southwest had some good flight times and was cheap. I usually avoid SW, but for an 1:15 flight, I don't really care what I fly. So we booked.

Two weeks later, one of the people we're getting together with informs us that he's being called away on business that weekend and said he knew we were flying in and probably couldn't change tickets without an expensive fee, but if we could, they could do the following or previous weekend. So I call Southwest to find out how much it would be to change and they look it up and say "Well the new tickets are $224 total and the tickets you have are $244 total, so you'd actually get a $20 refund". I said "really, no change fee?" And she said "nope, not on SW." She told me where to go on their website so I could do it myself and basically, if you buy two tickets on SW for $244, it's like you've just deposited $244 in a southwest bank. You can change that to any ticket you want so long as it's still the same two people going. I could decide, you know what, screw Philly, my wife and I are going to Vegas that weekend, it's $400 for us to get out there, so here's another $156 and we get tickets.

Anyway, having had to change flights once or twice and getting hit with the $100 change fee, I was lamenting how nice it would be if UA did this. I understand SW is a low cost airline without any frills and UA needs that revenue to have things like first class and entertainment and such. But it was so nice to be able to go on and be able to switch the flight without any worry about change fees and such--it's nice that SW recognizes that this is an easy operation that doesn't involve $100 worth of work for them to do so they don't charge for it.