ursine1

If an AT or BS fare (or any other "refundable" fare, such as Senior, Child, etc.) yes -- always cancel and rebook. Never change. (If you change, you lose refundability of these "refundable" fares.)

If you have EarlyBird Check-In attached, and don't want to lose it, always change, never cancel.

Tanic

There is also the conundrum of all tickets booked using RR points: Normally you would cancel and rebook, otherwise changing the ticket causes the 9/11 fee to become non-refundable and locked to the pax name. However doing so will cause loss of EBCI.

mke9499

Several upcoming flights showed points reduction, so I went through the refare process. When selecting the reduced points value to continue, the following message was displayed:

If I "Accept and continue," the page has an increase of more than 5,000 points for the flight. This happens each time, even when I log out and back in. So, when I think I'm going to be saving on three upcoming flights, instead, if I accept, each flight will cost 5,000+ additional points. As it shows only one seat available at the reduced fare, it's probably my seat. I don't want to risk canceling to find out if that makes the reduced fare available. I just may end up calling to find out what's happening and if there's a workaround, but I don't want to give up control of my bookings.

rsteinmetz70112

These was a similar refare bug for a while. You could call in and the phone reservations agents could fix it and get you the lower fare. They did not even see the problem.

mke9499

Has anyone discovered any way to refare online, yet, with this new format? I've had to call in twice to refare four flights, so far, and now have three more that need refaring.

In one instance, the Help Desk had to maneuver and ended up canceling and rebooking with the lower fares (which I couldn't do), after about 20-30 minutes. The other time, the CSR was able to change to the lower fare. When I commented about losing control over any booking touched by WN, she indicated that no longer is a problem.

This is so frustrating, after being able to simply refare online for so long. They are well aware of the issue.

lougord99

About a week ago I refared a points flight on the new format with no problem.

mke9499

How far away was it from your travel date? I was told that anything more than 30 days out was to be canceled and rebooked, but that did not work for me, either.

May I ask what browser you used?

lougord99

Again, this was a points refare. I used Firefox and it was the day before travel. I refared to the same flight ( points price had gone down )

jlt19

I'm having a similar issue as those above, whereas, the flight shows an available reduction in points, but when I got to change it, there is no reduction. However, I booked it with my husband's points, so I'm not sure if I call, they'll talk to me. Trying to explain to him what happened and what he needs to say isn't really worth the 1,000+ fair difference as he's clueless about all of this. Flight isn't until July, so should I hold out hope the "glitch" will be fixed by then?

toomanybooks

Buy a new ticket on points, then cancel the old one.

Unless you have EBCI and want to keep it.

mke9499

The problem, at least in my case, is that the points value can be about 5,000 more points if buying a new ticket, than the value I booked at. When I try to change, the search engine shows 1 or two seats available at about a 1500 points saving; but, continuing on, the message says that fare is no longer available. I log out and back in, and the same thing happens.

ursine1

Sadly, this refaring issue has been around for quite some time, and was apparently not addressed with this update (that I suspect was mostly cosmetic).

mke9499

I was just able to successfully refare a paid ticket for travel in about two weeks, all by myself. Now, if I were just able to do the same with my points bookings.

I miss the good old days, when all of this was so easy!

jlt19

Well for some reason I was dumb and booked r/t. Of course the other leg is far more now than when I booked, so wouldn't be worth it to cancel and rebook.

sdsearch

I'm confused by the +1234 and -1234 abbreviations on points reservation changes.

I had a points round-trip reservation (nonstop) for mid-January, and I decided I wanted to take a later outbound (also nonstop) flight. It showed +2000 or so in points for the next flight a couple hours later, and I thought, well OK, I'll pay 2000 extra points because it's worth it for me to fly a couple hours later. (This was on the outbound, I wasn't trying to modify the return at all.)

Well, without showing me any changes on the return it was making in any way that I could clearly see, it rebooked the entire round trip itinerary and credited me 2000 or so points. (Apparently it didn't touch my unchanged fees.)

So did this "+" mean "credit" rather than "you need to pay more"? Or did it mean "you need to pay more", but they repriced the return without showing me that the return had dropped 4000 or so points, and thus 2000 or so points more on the outbound was offset by 4000 or so points less on the return and thus added up to about 2000 points net credit?

(This is the first time I've modified a reservation on Southwest in many many years, if ever, so I have no idea how it's supposed to work now with a one-direction modification of a round trip.)