Hot Pocket

Hold the ticker tape parades...

Still getting an error message trying to make basic cash bookings as of 10:30 am EDT on Friday

cubbynole

Now if they can just get the travel funds updated. Had a $271.20 fare changed to a $234.00 fare - changed that to a $98.00 fare on Tuesday. Went to book something this morning, showing only $37.20 available, funds from my change from Tuesday aren't showing. Baby steps/patience, I suppose...

UALOneKPlus

If there's one take-away from all of this... Southwest needs to look at switching to Amazon web services to scale up servers and storage rapidly to accommodate site-crashing events like this.

Still waiting for a call back from Southwest to clarify some bookings... sigh...

sac86738

Quick data point for everyone:

Initial purchase included 2 passengers via RR redemption. Paid for taxes/fees using a gift card.

In this purchase, 1 passenger was dropped from the reservation, but the other made it. I ended up paying taxes/fees on both pax.

2nd attempt -- to get my other pax on the same flight, who was dropped in original attempt -- was a success. Still had to pay taxes/fees, but I can recoup those later after this melee is over with.

What a disaster; feel sorry for those pax who couldn't even check in for a period of time there. Goodness!

texashoser

That's not the problem. It's their homegrown, archaic reservation system and their backend databases that cause the havoc.

Pretty sure the front end proxies and web servers are all virtualized. If it were as simple as putting the databases on more powerful servers, they would have done that by now, and probably have.

sac86738

Too bad phone companies don't have loyalty programs for length of time talked. (or not, in your case.)

ilkhats44

Is the low fare calendar missing? I am not able to find it.

sac86738

Yes; Southwest is under tremendously heavy load right now due to the crazy sale driving lots of people to the web site, so they've disabled certain features of the site in order to reduce the # of hits to their database systems.

Typically, there are core features and auxiliary features (modules) that can be turned on and off at will. I believe this is an attempt to reduce database load. Could be wrong.

Lots of things are being tested right now, no doubt, as Southwest's IT department sorts the bodies out. Poor guys! LOL.

It's not really surprising, this disaster of downtime--we haven't seen fares this low since 2009, at least that's what I remember. I paid $69 to fly from SMF to SAN.

$49 is just ridiculous. Almost as good as the good 'ol days when SMF to SAN was a paltry $39. It's no wonder everyone and their mother is trying to book right now. Extending the sale will only prolong their agony--death by a thousand cuts. As mentioned before, they ought to stop the sale, determine the root cause, and come up with a fix. Whether that's a modified queuing system or something else.

ursine1

Now that I can log in, I'm trying to refare the single flight (out of 16) that is showing a lower price (in points), but when I try to actually complete the change, the points price jumps up to what I already booked it at and shows a difference of 0 points (1683 more points than what is shown initially). I've tried multiple attempts, using different browsers, over the past hour or so. When I check the points price via the app it still shows the lower price.

Awesome.

Exiled in Express

Do you have enough points to book as a duplicate itinerary and the cancel the higher priced one after the fact?

mke9499

Can you just do a new booking at the lower value on the app and cancel the original higher-priced trip?

JohnnyAwesome23

Well the domestic side is still on that ancient reservation system, but... when they fully switch to Amadeus' Altea suite for domestic, it should have cloud based demand scaling. The only reservation system I know of that uses is Amazon cloud, is RADIXX and no way could RADIXX handle Southwest.

alggag

I rebooked the one flight that I had purchased yesterday on this sale. Even after adding my RR# to the reservation this morning it still showed as earning 0 pts. I didn't feel like taking a chance so I just rebooked it while logged into my account and it now shows up as earning correctly. Of course while I was at it I added on a $140 RT to PHX for late summer.

darthbimmer

1. The IT meltdown over the past few days has forced me to booking one roundtrip on another airline that WN otherwise might have gotten.

2. Now that the website is at least showing fares today, I see that none of the trips I've previously booked have gotten cheaper.

3. And where I tried to book another two flights, it's still failing.

Thanks for nothing, Southwest.

texashoser

I've seen this happen when the site was not having problems. Customer Relations could duplicate the problem and forwarded this issue to IT. Not sure if they ever fixed it. They might have and the problem is rearing its head due to the non-functioning status of the website/reservation system.