I have 4 one-way SWA RR seats booked for Portland/Oregon (PDX) to Tampa/Florida (TPA) on 6/14, Flight #272 (6:15am-3:55pm). My cruise out of Tampa is being rebooked to be out of Miami so I now need to fly into Ft. Lauderdale instead and I now need the morning flight (Flight #272/236, 6:15am-4:40pm). So any readers here who are from Portland/Oregon that need to fly into Tampa on 6/14 , please contact me at [/email][email protected][/email]. There are no reward seats left for either cities so it would work for both parties to swap the seats. Since we live in same city, we could call Southwest Airlines at same time and have they swap the reward seats. I am traveling with 2 toddlers and the 5 hours drive from Tampa to Ft. Lauderdale would be too much for them after an 10 hours flight into Tampa. Thanks !

The odds of someone having four PDX-FLL award tickets confirmed for the day and flight you need it strike me about the same as the chances of winning the Megabucks. And even if such a person exists, I don't know that WN would permit the swap.

I think you have a better chance of award availability opening up between PDX-FLL; numerous participants here have reported award availability becoming available close in -- although getting four seats might be a stretch. I have personally experienced my preferred flight becoming available a day or two before -- or even the day of -- my scheduled travel, but in such cases I was only looking for one or, at the most, two seats.

You should be checking for availability two or three times daily using the change flight feature in Travel Tools.

Good luck.

Called SWA today and found out something quite interesting. I always assumed that if someone w/ RR seat cancel their flight, the seat would go back to the RR pool. According to the SWA rep, that's not always the case. If the flight is pretty full, SWA will turn that seat to a paid seat. So I guess my idea of swapping might not work. I will continue checking FLL availability. I explained to SWA rep of why I need to change the flight into FLL (cruise got rebooked to be out of Miami), she escalated my concern to supervisor and I was advised to talk to customer relations on Tuesday about changing to FLL. She said her supervisor couldn't change it but will note in the confirmation #s of what we spoke about. According to the rep, customer relation should have no problem accommodating the change. Keeping my fingers crossed for Tuesday.

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You could always buy tickets for TPA-FLL. They have them for $39 o/w. It kind of defeats the rr tickets but might work.

Or see if you can have a Rez agent add a leg to your PNR for TPA-FLL.

You shouldn't have to try and trade tickets.

I thought about that, however, weekend fare runs $69/each so with taxes/fees, it would cost more than $300 for all four of us. As I was checking RR availability, I noticed that more RR seats are becoming available for 2 weeks out so hopefully the FLL RR seats will open up next week if customer relations won't change my tickets.

You do not say when your cruise leaves, but if it leave late afternoon of 6/14, I think the flight you are looking at is "iffy". A cross country flight with a change can be delayed and you must allow a few hours to get bags and travel to ship.

If you fllight leaves 6/15, you could fly to Orlando on 6/14 on Award, stay overnight, and get a one way rental car to Tampa. Have to think of various options.

And remember, you can adjust the return to different airports than the outbound in case you can get Tampa to PDX for the return.

Cruise leave 6/15. I did look at the Orlando option. The only RR availability is for a flight arriving around 9pm and I think it's about 3 1/2 hours drive to Mami. Need to check in for Cruise by 1pm on 6/15. I was just hoping to save the kids from the long drive by flying into FLL. Thanks for all the suggestions. I didn't know this site existed until yesterday and been reading up lots of interesting posts.

Sorry, I misread you post. I read it as your cruise moved from Miami to Tampa, not the other way around.

I've not had a chance to look into options for the OP, but I notice this thread lacks a "Welcome to FlyerTalk, dnvhle!"

Voluntarily by you or is it a change forced by the cruise company?It is a long drive (4.5 hours TPA to the cruise port); you well might not want to drive the whole thing after a transcon flight, but note that your current air itinerary is actually 6:40, not ten hours.To make it quicker and easier the OP should bookmark the Change Itinerary link that is displayed on her MySouthwest Future Itineraries page.I could be wrong but I doubt customer relations can change you to flights for which there is no award availability; it's worth a try, but you should be prepared with a backup plan, such as...this excellent suggestion by tusphotog. Fortunately you are booked on a direct flight to TPA (the suggestion would not work if you already had two flight numbers on your itinerary). Even with your direct flight, if you get a CSR who insists on sticking to the "letter of the law" you won't be able to add TPA-FLL to your itinerary, even though award seats are available on 14-Jun, and you could book it that way yourself online on any date for which it and SWA272 from PDX to TPA both have award seats available. In fact, I would think an RSA supervisor could even authorize this type of change. (The one who looked at your situation most likely looked only at changing you to published, scheduled service for PDX-FLL; it is not surprising the supervisor could not make that type of change.) You could try calling reservations again before Tuesday. If the first RSA and sup can't make it work, give polite thanks for the efforts and phone back to try again with another rep.With your 1pm deadline Monday, you could book Monday morning flights for $39++ (from either TPA or MCO). Granted it obviously would be more hassle having to go through airport security again.One difference may be that your flight is a summer Sunday. Those have notoriously poor award seat availability, so I think the odds are low in your case.You save about 45 minutes driving to MIA from MCO versus TPA, but you'd be giving up your efficient direct flight to TPA for a 9:40 connecting flight.(FCFree, Bill Owen might be in need of your expert assistance! SWA has PDX-TPA direct but all their PDX-MCO flights are connections! )

If you aren't able to get the flights changed with either tusphotog's idea or through a CSR on Tuesday, you may have to rent a car and split up the drive, finishing it Monday morning.

Don't forget that you can use your RR awards for one way trips. You can book a one-way flight from PDX to FLL or MIA on a carrier with more reasonable fares (or one way award seat availability if you have the miles), and save half of your SWA awards for future use.

I assume you don't have travel insurance? This is going off-topic and at this point only good for the "lessons learned" file, but (IMHO) good travel insurance should always be purchased by anybody who decides to book related air and cruise travel independently.

I would only do ftnoob's suggestion of taking a morning flight if I took the first flight TPA-FLL, the 0710 departure. It gets you in to FLL at 0800, so you'll have time to kill there, but it's better than being up in Tampa waiting for a delayed 0945 departure that will put you to your cruise after it departs.

What I'd do is call reservations, ask to have them add a leg on your tickets. I'm not 100% sure if they can (I don't see why it wouldn't be possible) and book the evening departure to FLL on the 14th. If that doesn't work, you could always try flying in to West Palm Beach. Flight 272 flies PDX-DEN-TPA-PBI. The drive down from West Palm isn't that bad--I've done it a couple times to the Miami area. It's about an hour without traffic, straight down the 95. Much nicer than the 4-5 hour hike from TPA.

By the way, if you book PDX-PBI, you'll probably need to call reservations to force a booking on that flight. For some reason it doesn't show up in the reservations.

Good luck.

Thank you so much for all the ideas/suggestions. I did look into flying into West Palm Beach but website said PDX service is not available till the 27th. I will check w/ SWA tomorrow about adding the TPA-FLL leg, I didn't know I could ask that. Thanks for the suggestion. If adding the FLL leg doesn't work, will try customer relations Tuesday to see if they would allow the change - will you guys posted. Thanks again. I love this site - so informative !

I got the same message. What you'll need to do is book it is call reservations--they should be able to manually book the connection. The website won't let you book PDX-DEN and DEN-PBI on the same flight number. If you were buying the ticket, this would be a moot point since you could just book it on two different PNRs.

Now, what I don't understand (and maybe SWAV can shed some light on this), why doesn't the website pull PDX-PBI on 6/14? Flight 272 goes PDX-DEN-TPA-PBI. Two stops is legal...so I'm a bit puzzled why someone couldn't book it.

try rsw its the closest other then miami 2 1/4 hours across the "ally"