New SWA/VISA Promo: $25 off a future flight with $100 southwestgiftcard purchase

icurhere2, it might be worth a peek in your spam folder, if you haven't already done so. I would have guessed that the Emails were all sent within a fairly short time window. If you met the requirements (used Visa to purchase minimum $100 GC at southwest.com June 1-June 30) it would seem you should have the code by now.

The only other glitch I can think of would be if the system looked at the date the gift card code was issued instead of the date the purchase was made. Did anyone here receive a code for a gift card purchase where the 12-hour delay resulted in the GC being issued 01-Jul even though it was purchased on 30-Jun?

Thanks for working on this, Brian!

Here is what I've been through so far: On Saturday I tried the usual WN cure-all, phoning reservations. K.., the CSR who answered was friendly and helpful, and fairly quickly saw on her system the same problem I was experiencing. After a reasonably brief hold (um, under normal circumstances, anyway; the four straight DING!s at the beginning of the hold made it seem much worse than it was), she returned to inform me that she would transfer me to supervisor G.. who would take care of me. A moment later I heard a familiar and ominous CLICK. Holding my breath, crossing my fingers, and clicking my heels three times were insufficient to prevent the dreaded "RING!" followed by "If you'd like to make a call, please hang up..." The "oops, I cut off the caller trying to transfer him" snafu.

Phone call number two to the RR priority line was much less pleasant. CSR S.. informed me that there was no supervisor G.. at her location, so I must have reached a different call center. Rather than do what I thought was the smart thing (passing me to some supervisor immediately), S.. insisted on learning every detail of my issue for herself. She took twice as long as did CSR K.. to grok the situation, and was maybe 10% as friendly about it all. I was finally told (after many more grating DING! sound effects) that internal support in Dallas was reporting that the coupon can not be used on all flights. (I already knew that it could not be applied to all fares, but there is no mention in the T&C of it being restricted to particular flights, other than the Labor Day blackout.) Only after a reminder that the other call center had told me that supervisor G.. could take care of me did CSR S.. finally decide to let me talk to a supervisor, with the stern warning that there was nothing else that could be done. Supervisor S.. (I think, but it may have been C..) proved quite useless, repeating himself many times with the unhelpful advice to book on a different day, and wild theories that maybe the travel date that had no availability was some kind of unlisted blackout day (this despite my repeatedly telling him fares on different routes had coupon availability that same day). I was also repeatedly told that he and the CSRs had no ability to even view these "Internet only sale fares," even though I repeatedly replied that CSR K.. had almost instantly brought up the coupon fares on her system. I was further repeatedly told that I could wait until Monday to speak with customer relations (closed on the weekend), but that of course I risked seeing these "short-term Internet only sale fares" disappearing by Monday.

WN Time Tax Tally so far: 10-15 minutes first phone call, 40+ minutes second phone call. And I'm not even pursuing a particularly attractive fare; WN's fare before the coupon would be $150 more (for a party of three) than the lowest legacy fare available as of Saturday. (But of course WN has the only non-stop service on the route.)

I finally suggested that supervisor S.. should seriously consider letting somebody important know about this issue, because (while I'm not a lawyer, have never played one on TV, and have never even stayed at a Holiday Inn Express), I just could not imagine any attorney general looking kindly on WN applying previously undisclosed restrictions to an offer for which the customer could not rescind their participation. Supervisor S.. noted that "if Dallas gets enough complaints about this" maybe somebody would look into it; he, however, had no interest in making sure this was brought to the attention of anyone else.

This was then followed by a series of long-distance phone calls with the relative considering making this discretionary leisure trip, thus wasting another hour or so of my weekend. Counting time checking, rechecking and posting to FT, I have to be up to at least three hours of lost time.

Why you (perhaps) should care even if you don't have a coupon code: While I didn't do enough searching to make a definitive determination, it appears that the reservation system will only allow use of these codes on flights for which there is award seat availability. We all know award availability has been pretty poor lately. Well, what happens when someone books a ticket with a coupon? Does award seat availability drop even further on that flight?

Despite the skepticism expressed by many in the early days of this thread, this promotion had the potential to be rather nice, and I was one of the voices suggesting folks "go for it; what have you got to lose?" As currently implemented it could certainly backfire in the goodwill department. I surely hope Brian can find the right people to get this resolved.

On the positive side, a friend who back in June had no idea he would be traveling WN in the coupon validity period was able to pocket a nice savings for himself and his companion.

icurhere2, send me a PM with your itinerary and travel dates, and I'll let you know whether use of the coupon is even possible for your flights.

I doubt any coupons are still pending delivery to the recipient, so you might consider trying to escalate the issue. If your incoming mail server had an outage the Email could have bounced. There is no easy way to determine whether your mail server was able to handle the bounce correctly, or whether anyone at WN has cleared bounces they did receive. Also, sometimes Emails do just get lost in cyberspace.