Group of 6...one not going but want to use her seat?
 

There is a group of 6 of us booked on one record.

One of the group is not going to take the outbound but will take the return.

We don't care about the credit for the outbound flight, but instead, would rather have use of her seat for comfort, etc..

Is it possible to check her in and just do this?

I see this could be problematic though because in the event of a full flight they might question why a seat is empty and they might not want a passenger on the manifest who is actually not really onboard.

Any suggestions?

Not sure, but if you have CP I think you can designate your companion as yourself and get a reserved seat sign for a seat. People might not be happy but it works.

No. You can't occupy more seats than you have actual people unless you have set up one of the people as a Customer of Size in advance.

Neither do you need to cancel the outbound for her, although it would be nice of you to ask the gate agent to delete her boarding pass and preserve the return reservation.

So if you print a boarding pass, I assume the gate agent won't take it if you tell them she's not going but you just want the seat, correct?

It would be necessary to make someone else in the group a customer of size other than the one not flying in order to preserve her seat? Could we use her existing fare on the outbound and keep her returnf are locked in too?

Seems kind of complicated!

Correct. You can give the BP and get charged for the flight if you want, but you can't hold the seat if someone else wants it. The seats are not assigned and the only way to claim an extra and keep it is to be a COS.

If you don't fly the outbound the return does NOT cancel. The value of the outbound is reusable by the original traveler for up to a year from original purchase date. This feature is not like other airlines.

How confident are you on that one, nsx? The CoC explicitly says that they can do just that:

http://www.southwest.com/assets/pdfs...f-carriage.pdf

Water over the bridge now, but a good reason to book individual itineraries and one ways even if it is a big PITA to do so. That said, here is a suggestion that might get this fixed.

Call customer service and explain the situation and that you wish to have one of the six passengers split into its own PRN that consists of just the one way back. Tell them the reason that you want to do this. You are wanting to cancel just the outbound portion of that one PRN so it will not make a mess of the reservation for six people. You should end up with a single booking for the five remaining and a OW for the person with the missing outbound. Do not be surprised if the easiest way to do this is to cancel and rebook the entire itinerary as six individual ones so that the missing outbound can be canceled. You may end up with that passenger having unused TTF's for the cancelled leg of the trip on their name, depending on how it is handled.

This can be done. Whether it will be done is the question.

You may have more success contacting our personal FT gurus, southwestwhit, southwestgabe, or the others by PM with your dilemma. This is the sort of thing at which they excel.

Another solution is that when it's time to check-in for the flight and print boarding passes, do not checkmark the one passenger.

If the rest of you board without checking that person in, Southwest will not page the person or hold up boarding because they never checked in. That person will have ticketless travel funds for that one-way originating flight available within 24hrs of the flight they missed. Those funds will be in their name only, unless it was booked as full fare or business select in which case they are refundable.

You could also ask the gate agent to remove them from the flight to sell their seat to a standby/etc, however I don't believe the gate agent can truly delete the reservation (just a boarding pass) without it affecting the rest of the group on the same PNR, or affecting that person's return flight.

[QUOTE=chuck1;19091567]There is a group of 6 of us booked on one record.

One of the group is not going to take the outbound but will take the return.

We don't care about the credit for the outbound flight, but instead, would rather have use of her seat for comfort, etc..

Is it possible to check her in and just do this?

I see this could be problematic though because in the event of a full flight they might question why a seat is empty and they might not want a passenger on the manifest who is actually not really onboard.

Any suggestions?[/QUO


Only problem i see if this empty is available, they will clear standbys and fill it up.

Good luck with this strategy.

Nobody here has ever reported having a return trip canceled after no-showing the outbound.

Deleting anyone off of a PNR with more than 1 person is possible but I use that term in the most hypothetical way because its just not done in reality. Most systems have some sort of restriction placed on multi-pax PNRs such as you can delete a person but if there are multiple legs you are deleting multiple legs or nothing (hence my recommendation to book O/Ws as well).

PNR?

You can always print someone elses BP but you cant give anyone a BP without the person being there. No show occurs when a specific person does not board, not when they do/do not print their boarding pass or check in for specific flight.

This is written more for the sake of covering every type of situation. If it wasnt written people would abuse it.

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OP - I would strongly advise you to not try this idea. The safest thing to do is to call res and explain to them what is going on and they will give you options what to do.

Ok, I am acronymic-dyslexic. Sorry.

:D

WN is "open seating"..meaning this person did not have an assigned seat to start with, so there is no seat to be retained. There may be one less pax on the plane and if you don't inform WN one seat will remain open somewhere on the plane, but you won't know which seat that will be.