Something I noticed, not doing as many bookings as others. When I rebooked (cancelling a reservation and starting a new one with the funds in order to get the double credit), I was logged in and the funds covered the cost exactly, and they said I needed to fill in my address, which I think would otherwise have already been showing when I was logged in.

Yes, this is a nuisance. I wish Southwest would fix it.

Its on the list . . .
as well as the problems with changing itineraries.

I can't tell you how many hours of testing went into the new site, but as strange as it may seem - testing in the development area never yields the exact same results as the production website.

We are working through all of these issues as quickly as possible to ensure that southwest.com reamains the Customer friendly site that its always been.

Can I add one to the wish list? When changing from a regular reservation to RR/CP or vice versa, can the page remember your itinerary so you don't have to re-specify it?

My wife is forced to make her corporate reservations via a travel agency portal. Heretofore, I have always been able to go into Southwest.com to add a RR#, e-mail the reservation, etc. As this new system has rolled out, I have lost these functionalities, I assumed that Southwest would eventually correct this issue, but it has been more than a week. Now I can't access the OLCI functionality, which might be a major issue, save for the fact she is A-List. Here is the error message I receive on all of the above issues: "We are currently unable to complete your request due to an undefined error. If this is the first time you have seen this message, please go back and try again. If you continue to have difficulties, please contact a Southwest Airlines Customer Representative for assistance at 1-800-I-FLY-SWA (1-800-435-9792). Reference code: SW900000-SS6A-265379725 Occurred on: 10/01/2009 08:17:00 " I certainly hope these issues are resolved in short order, as I am sure that there are others out there that are required to use third party portals, and this could become a major issue, particularly with OLCI.

You should still be able to add RR# and send a new e-mail itinerary through the Travel Tools page. If not, it is something specific to her reservation(s) - possibly something the travel agency portal is doing when it books.

Without an example its difficult to tell.

As for online checkin - some changes were made to the website today in order to support TSA Secure Flight - and we are currently working through some issues that the changes have caused with online checkin.

The team is "all hands on deck" working to resolve as quickly as possible.

I booked a couple of trips through SWABIZ lately as our company has a relationship and requests us to do so. However I am unlikely to do this ever again due to the incredible stress of changing reservations. Not only am I blocked from changing online, but the phone waits have been 15 to 25 minutes. I have had to change three flights on two weeks of travel. Several times my cell phone has dropped the call, other times I had the call back. Southwest, we are not all sitting around waiting for call backs. Today while on hold I was really trying to get down to the steam room of this nice resort hotel for some much needed de-stressing. Instead I am sitting on hold, using two phones, just to see which one will get results faster. The agents have been saying "we are incredibly busy" for two whole weeks. So what I say is that you are understaffed and beating the crap out of your customers. Why can't SWABIZ have online flight changes? This is nuts. Corporate compliance folks will lose if what they are trying to get compliance with is a huge extra STRESS. And, on my latest flight change, the agent did not send me the confirmation e-mail, so I had to call back AGAIN, missing half of a reception. Come on! Please, we are not your servants, don't force us to sit in our chairs for an hour to do something that should take three minutes! You are doing things to my life just for your own cost-saving--it costs ME to do business with you, not just the dollars which are fine but in the extra effort. Please put flight changes into SWABIZ and put more staff on the phone.

Welcome to FlyerTalk, Oleander0!

Oleander0 -

I'm truly sorry to hear that you are having so much difficulty.

I'm a little confused because SWABIZ does indeed have flight change capabilities. Its under Travel Tools - Change Air Reservation.

I can tell you that if its booked on SWABIZ, it cannot be changed through southwest.com - the changes have to be done through SWABIZ.
I'm not certain if thats what has caused the issues you are having or not.

Since the launch of our new booking site, we are also aware of some issues that Customers are having with flight changes, and we are working through those and trying to get them resolved as quickly as possible.

As for the missing e-mail receipt - the agent doesn't actually send these, it should automatically be sent when the change is made. Of course, sometimes things get lost in cyberspace, or end up in junk/spam folders. And, sometimes the automated system hiccups and the receipt isn't sent.

Without additional details about the change you were trying to make, and the error message that you received it would be impossible for me to speculate on what specific issue your reservations might be having and why you didn't receive your receipt.

SWAVictor

The timing of the initial rollout of the new reservation pages was such that I did not have much of a chance to give them a workout for at least a few weeks. I still wouldn't say I've given them a "thorough" workout, but I've worked with them enough to assign a tentative grade, which I'll break into two components.

1. For the design (how it looks): B-
2. For the implementation: F

To those who complained upthread about speed issues: I retract, and offer a full apology for, my earlier comments in support of the performance of the new reservation page. It works well enough on some platforms, but not on others. If you don't have one of the recent ultra fast browsers, the new reservation page is virtually unusable. Below is a thumbnail image of a screenshot showing the absurdly high demand the new SWA pages place on the CPU when rendered in Firefox 2.0.0.20 on one of my computers:For comparison, here is SideStep running in the same browser:The spikes have labels indicating what action caused them, which you can read if you click the images to view the larger versions on PicasaWeb. If you do follow the links you can then right click to view the image at full resolution, if need be.

Although I didn't take the time to generate screen captures, I also looked at the CPU demand required to use the smart search features of marriott.com, choicehotels.com, google.com, and en.wikipedia.org. With the exception of marriott.com, CPU loads were all trivial, generally even less than shown above for SideStep.

Programmer egos often prevail over usability, bringing horrible features like multi-level rollout menus and Flash interfaces. I was extremely relieved to see the redesign team avoid those sorts of problems. There is no excuse, however, for this serious performance issue not being caught in the beta test stage.

If you have trouble with the speed of the new primary reservation page, I advise using the old page or the widget on the main page.

Southwest really needs to hire ftnoob. Maybe they think they can't afford to, but I'm thinking they can't afford not to. @:-)

It appears that a third-party software provider is responsible for the horribly slow "improvements":

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Southw...html/print?x=0

I disagree.

I can't be certain from reading the release, but QPX may not even be running SWA searches yet. (Luckily ITA does a better job writing software than they did with this press release.) It appears QPX will at some point replace SWA's current (or recently retired?) fare search engine. (The fare search engine runs behind the scenes after you feed it your search request.) The slowness issues I documented above are all related to the front end. As noted in the press release, QPX is already used by SideStep, Hotwire, other airlines, etc. If QPX were the source of the slowness, we wouldn't see such a dramatic performance difference between the SideStep UI and the SWA UI.

I infer from the press release that SWA has decided it is cheaper for them to license third party software than it is to rewrite their own fare search engine in hopes of catching up to (constantly evolving) industry standards. Someday we'll see which QPX features SWA chooses to offer via southwest.com. Alternate airports, flexible dates, weekend searches, and more complete/accurate fare calendar searches are several possibilities. To explore the features offered by QPX, log in as guest at ITA's demo page.

I don't know whether SWA will be able to (or want to) connect the system used by RSAs to the QPX search engine.

SWAVictor, the new "Modify Search" feature is currently not working for me. I can't take the time to figure out whether it is a specific rare problem or a general problem. On a one way search changing the destination is currently repeating the prior search. Trying to change the origin produces:

I am unable to recreate the issue you are having.

Although I can tell you that if your original search was one-way, you cannot at this time use the "modify search" to change the search to a roundtrip (or vice-verse). In other words on a one-way search both boxes marked "Return" (city and date) will not produce any results.

I have made several attempts changing the "From", "To" and "Depart(date)" - and always get the updated search results.

The "no outbound flight selected" error sounds like you are trying to "Continue" without actually selecting a flight.

If it instead says "No departure airport selected" - then that would be an issue with the flyouts . . we usually see this when a Customer types a space after the airport/city name.