joshua362

I wonder how much was lost during the pandemic…..

Probably an embarrassment of riches to the extent they can feel like they can handle a hit to increase their reserve liability without effecting the bottom line to much. I imagine with the state of travel and reduced schedules unused funds have to be near an all time low.

AllThePants

whoa.

btw my wife and I we've usually got 2K of travel funds with various expiration dates that I'm always mentally shuffling around to optimize for non-expiry of said funds.

this makes my life so much easier.

ymx

I have expired funds from May that I was going to have reinstated as a LUV voucher in November.

If I cancel a flight booked from the voucher, will the refund be converted to these new non-expiring travel funds?

———-

Update: just chatted with an agent and she confirmed that any flight cancelled from that voucher will be refunded to those non-expiring funds.

danhouston

likely

AllThePants

Hmm -- with this new policy change the next logical step would be for Southwest to just implement a per-account "wallet" that could be used to pay for flights using accrued travel funds. Since there's no expiration anymore, all travel funds are basically fungible -- so there should not really be a need to select *which* travel fund(s) to apply to a flight.

I think I recall Virgin America having a similar thing back in the day -- and that was nice feature.

^ Suggestion for the eng/product teams there SWAVictor

rsteinmetz70112

Airtran had expiring credits but also had a wallet that automagically used the oldets funds to purchase a new ticket, no designating which ones to use.

AllThePants

Yeah - it's been trickier with southwest historically -- because of the whole "new travel inherits the earliest expiration date" policy.

Just yesterday - I booked a $400 flight with $300 in July travel funds + $100 in new money, I had another $25 fund that I had to explicitly *not* use because it had a March expiration, and I didn't want my $300 to take on that march date.

Now, with this new change, all that gaming / micro-optimizing is moot. Which is great! Because that previously consumed way too much of my mental bandwidth.

I'm sure the quants there modeled this out -- and although SWA will be out some amount of $ from breakage on the funds, and are carrying more ongoing liability on the books. But this makes for a wholly much better customer experience and reduces the friction to maintain brand loyalty.

lairdb

This will be interesting. I have no TTF at present, but I have a LUV Voucher. Currently, the voucher value website is giving wonky results: it showed $0 even though it's still valid (confirmed by phone.)

If they come back as still expiring, then it seems obvious to book a dummy res and cancel it -- so they might as well treat LUV vouchers (and gift cards?) as non-expiring as well.

pitflyer

So what we're thinking is that those of who have _expired_ travel funds can still request a LUV travel voucher till the end of December, which in turn will still expire at some point, but as long as we use _that_ to book a ticket and then cancel _that_ ticket, then it becomes unexpiring travel funds.

Whew, who's going to be the first one to test this? I have a small amount that before this announcement I was waiting till December to convert -- as I was expecting a LUV voucher good for another six months and that's the end of the road. Now it seems like I can rinse that to an unexpiring travel fund, which by applying to WGA+ itineraries I could transfer to someone else (currently one of the advantages of LUV vouchers as they are good for anyone).

kennycrudup

The cynic in me agrees with you ... this seems too good and I wonder what the "other shoe" is?

roelb

While very customer friendly, this seems to be a rash decision without thinking everything thru. "No" expiration /at all/ means that in 20, 30 or 40 years time, the balance sheet will contain an evergrowing amount of outstanding credit risk. and the database of open tickets will steadily grow with it. At some point in time their accountants will push them to do something about this growing problem. Which will probably result in them limiting the validity to a fixed period again. And taking something away from your customers is never a good idea.

It would have been much smarter to put in an arbitrary limit from the start, say 25 years of validity. That would have sent out exactly the same signal to their customers, with everyone happy. But it would not have put an upper limit to both the credit risk and open ticket database size, which makes it by definition a manageable policy.

joshua362

What about abandoned property / escheat laws? I too am surprised there isn't some upper limit. There has to be something internally in place eventually for systems and accounting purposes.

rsteinmetz70112

They could simply impose a deadline on outstanding Travel Funds, like they once did on Drink Coupons.

pitflyer

I became the DP. I asked via Twitter (App chat is never available) with two funds that expired July 7th for a travel voucher to be issued. They said they'll let me know in 30 days via email. No mention of $100 penalty (as they are less than $100 each) so assume the policy still applies to re-issue at no cost. We'll see if the LUV voucher applies -- doesn't really matter because I'll just apply them to something and cancel to get unexpiring travel funds.

NoStressHere

They had a deadline on travel funds - one year. LOL!