screeton

A side effect bonus for Southwest... more often than not, the canceled reservation will go back into inventory at a higher fare bucket, because its closer to day of departure and the plane is theoretically filled to a higher percentage than when the reservation was originally made.

rsteinmetz70112

On the other side if someone books a speculative flight that will probably result in other passengers being charged more money at lease partially offsetting any benefits to Southwest and possibly result in higher profits.

traveldreaming

So I'm working on something like a test - have a booking for MCO-DCA midday on the 10th of May, as well as a CLE-MCO for later in the evening. I'm going to let them both ride for a couple days, just to see if they cancel one. I should know in a couple days, after which I'll cancel the unneeded DCA flight if WN hasn't decided to do it for me.

Often1

What if WN cancels the other?

Kevin AA

Southwest can do that all by themselves. They set the size of their own fare buckets.

ENOTTY

Looking forward to your datapoint. Been mulling something like this recently.

traveldreaming

So far, so good. Made it through two midnights and no cancellation yet. I'm hopeful and relieved, because while this particular flight combination would be pretty difficult to manage, I have ended up with seemingly crazy flight pairs before and don't much like the idea of an automated feasibility yardstick.

traveldreaming

So a final update before I cancel my 'extra' flight: still no auto cancellation on either my midday MCO-CLE or evening DCA-MCO flights. I don't think it'd be physically possible to make both, but apparently that's not the yardstick they're using.

philipgbaker

Just experienced a similar problem. Booked a RT and then was considering returning to another city. So booked a second return trip to 2nd city. This morning found that the original RT was cancelled. Called SW and they blamed it on the new reservation system. After some discussion and after cancelling the reservation to the other city, they reinstated the original reservation. Understand double bookings are frowned upon, but I would expect them to announce a change like this. An A+ flyer with Companion pass for many years. In future will only book one way flights.

ursine1

Data point: A good friend currently has multiple one-way bookings, all the same city pairs, two per day for two consecutive days, booked with points, and has not yet had any canceled. These were booked in January, for travel in late May.

nsx

I think the date of the original booking makes the difference.

ScroogeMcFlyer

I made a reservation in early March (for travel in June) for a one-way flight. I have never made any other bookings for that date or travel or travel on days before/after.

I happened to look at my reservation a few days ago and it said it was cancelled. After searching my emails, I did find an email a few days after saying there was a "points adjustment to my account" but I get those for every award booking I make, so I just ignore those.

I called, they said there was a duplicate booking made. After over an hour on the phone, the WN Rep said that there was another reservation, for 2 other people (who I do not know - she told me their first names) traveling on a completely different itinerary (she didn't tell me where) with the same record locator, so the system canceled my "duplicate" booking but never re-booked me with a different PNR.

The agent re-booked and honored the points price for the flight I originally booked.

I would have been really upset if I found out about this when I went to travel. Still annoyed to spend over an hour getting it re-booked.

I checked all of my other bookings and everything is in tact. Clearly, there are some bugs in the system.

nsx

I wouldn't be surprised if this feature had recently been dialed back to a less aggressive setting.

synergistic

I think the issue he's describing had to do with the duplicate PNRs, not the automated cancellation of overlapping speculative bookings.

It does seem like they might have changed things on the less feasible bookings, though. I don't have any "We'll probably find a good deal in one of these cities that weekend..." trips planned right now, but I'll probably test the system sometime before June when I expect at least a few. I'll report back here when I give it a try.

Often1

These datapoints don't really help because what we don't know and what WN does know are the loads on the flights. If you double book on flights booked to 50% capacity, so what?

As those flights fill up, it may be that the WN algorithm kicks in. But, we don't know when or at what breakpoint.

Thus, I would not take any comfort from the fact that a double booking does or does not work in any given situation.

Nobody outside of RM/IM at WN has access to the data.