A few days ago I almost booked flights on another airline after running out of patience with the relatively poor search capabilities of the Plan Trip page on southwest.com. I have therefore begun experimenting with ways to improve the experience. Here is a tip I discovered this morning: When you want a quick answer to the question "what would it cost to purchase a ticket for this flight instead of burning an award?" all you have to do is append "&type=" (without the quotes) to the URL already shown in your browser while the "Select Flight" page is displayed. The quickest way to do that in most (non-Mac) browsers is:

1. Press Alt-D (IE and Firefox) or Ctrl-L (Opera and Firefox)
2. Press right-arrow key (or End key)
3. Type (or paste from clipboard): &type=
4. Press Enter
5. Voila! View the pricing for your selected route and dates!

On their "Review Trip Itinerary" page, continental.com conveniently displays "Without redeeming your miles, this trip is currently available in Economy Class for a total of $___ for all passengers." and the hot-linked text "Purchase this reservation without redeeming miles." It would have been trivial for southwest to put a clickable link to a standard fare search on the award availability display, so it is quite an annoyance that they make us "Start Over" and enter all the search parameters again.

A few other things to note:

• The full parameter is probably supposed to be "&type=Standard" but standard is the default so only the part through "=" is required.
• It doesn't matter whether your search returned award availability or not, you can still use this tip to quickly switch to a standard search;
• This only works if you do the award search first (but see additional tip below);
• Edit: (I wanted to edit this last point to display it in a strike-through font. It appears, however, that this bbs does not support that style, so I have italicized it and made it the smallest supported font.) When you execute the standard search the server will update your session parameters. If you use the back function of the browser to return to the award search results and then click the seat finder link, you will be shown the low fare calendar instead of the SeatFinder calendar. If you want to easily recover access to SeatFinder, simply change the parameter at the end of the URL line to "&type=RapidRewards", press Enter, and then click the SeatFinder link. This parameter must be entered in full and exactly as listed here, including capitalization, or it will be ignored and a standard search will be performed. Edit: I now suspect that something I did in another window or tab affected the session parameters; I have not been able to duplicate the behaviour described in this bullet point.

Note to Brian: the shortcomings of the Plan Trip page relative to current industry standards are so significant that, IMO, they really need to be addressed ASAP. This should not wait for southwest.com 2.0. Southwest.com imposes an enormous "time tax" on price-sensitive travelers. Isn't that, in effect, a "hidden charge" that violates company ideals?

I should have mentioned you can also switch to a companion pass search by appending "&type=Companion" (without the quotes) to the URL. Suppose you have successfully booked an award seat and want to add a companion. To avoid entering the city pairs and dates from scratch, it might work to use the browser back history list to jump all the way back to the search results page and add the companion parameter to the URL. I did not make a dummy award reservation to test this, so it might not work; the server's session data may not allow it (you might see the "you have already booked this itinerary" message).

Also, I meant to clarify that these tips should also work on the Mac, I just don't know how to translate the Alt-D keystroke sequence into whatever is required on Mac browsers.