Originally Posted by AllThePants

Another note -- always make sure you successfully switch your cheap booking into your preferred booking time before cancelling your flight.

The only time I've ever had this almost backfire was when the booking system had some lock in place to not allow making the free change into a fairly packed weekend flight. I'm not sure if it was intentional on SWA's part -- or just a bug in the system. I'm guessing the latter. But it would fail on the last confirmation step and prompted me to call -- which I really don't like doing. I'm sure the CS agents could've probably worked this out, but I neither wanted to sit on hold nor have to explain to anybody why I wanted two seats on the same flight for myself.

In the end I just kept and flew the primary flight (at my preferred time) -- which -- because I booked early enough, wasn't actually that much more than the cheapest flight option I wanted to substitute. But if I had cancelled the primary booking before trying to attempt the switchover -- and having it fail -- things might've gotten ugly.

Originally Posted by Southwest4ever

It's 7/11-8/14, confirmed

Originally Posted by Troopers

Was just able to change a 8/19 flight.

Originally Posted by ursine1

As I mentioned earlier, they're doing approximately a week of schedule each day. The changes should be finished by Friday, and will adjust things through September 6.

Originally Posted by MrsWLV

I have to call (ugh!) to fix LAS—FLL flights 7/30-8/3. It has turned into LAS (MCI) AUS landing at 5:25pm & AUS-FLL is supposed to depart at 4:25pm. The flight back has a 3 hr layover at DAL. No thank you to any of those!

Originally Posted by synergistic

Oh no, the wait times are (kind of understandably) terrible right now. We had to call in re: a delay, and also had them change a booking whose free change window had expired, which had been turned into a multi-stop flight. Having two things to handle made the very long wait feel a little more worth it.

Them, of course, the next day I found another one that I couldn't change online and would have needed to call in - my flight from Spokane back home turned into a trip back from Denver. Free changes were available, but the message only showed DEN and COS as my free origins. I couldn't bring myself to ask my husband to wait through that again so soon - I just went ahead and booked from scratch. Is that an option for you, without losing many points/$? The online changes are so simple and so generous, but when you run into one that won't change online, it's pretty frustrating.

Originally Posted by MrsWLV

Its about a 16k point difference in the round trip so calling it is. I booked FLL because there were some nice rates from Vegas for an end of summer trip.

I’ll wait until I have time to just leave it on speaker and do something else while I wait.

Originally Posted by synergistic

I actually checked FLL-LAS recently, and the lowest points cost available during the change window is 6547 - if you're talking about a 16k point difference, you must not be doing the trick this whole thread is about. If you have 13,000 points to spare, book LAS-FLL-LAS for 17 and 18 August. Choose the 6547 rate flights - it does not matter that the dates and times don't work for you. After the trip is confirmed, you'll be able to change those new flights to exactly the flights your want, without being charged additional points. After you're done, you can cancel the original booking that Southwest snarled up. Unless you've got a much better rate than that, this will be much easier than calling in. Might even save you some points, cuz if you didn't know to do this, your original flights might be more than 7k each way.

​​​edit: mixed up the direction the first time around. Same drill regardless

Originally Posted by MrsWLV

The flights that are screwed up are the 7k one way rate. I want to keep that so I’ll have to call to get them fixed. If I cancelled and rebooked for the specific times I want, it is significantly more. I prefer to book the ones that I want and not hope that I’ll be able to change to something better.

I do understand the trick this thread is primarily about.

Originally Posted by buzglyd

Phone wait times are about two hours and I sent a message via FB this morning with all the information they requested and still no reply.

Any suggestions?

Originally Posted by smmrfld

Twitter DM.