Good morning everyone. A few weeks ago, I made a speculative Southwest Airlines booking to Lihue, Kauai for the first week of Laura’s summer vacation. I’ve seen the price of the flight drop a few times since I made the original reservation and checked for price drops every Tuesday morning (after SWA sends out their deals email). Unfortunately, when I checked the prices for this trip, I could not see the non-stop flights from Oakland (OAK) to Lihue (LIH). I started digging into the reservations and found out that the outbound flight was completely cancelled and the return flight was changed to the following day with 2 stops. I understand that this is a very uncertain time, but the part that really bugs me is that SWA did not send me an email about the flight cancellation or schedule change. I also needed to reach out to SWA to redeposit the SWA points back into my account. I will share all the details below.
When I logged into my SWA account and went to the My Trips section, it showed my 2 original SWA flights and flight details. But when I clicked on each reservation, I saw something completely different.
The first SWA reservation (OAK-LIH) was completely cancelled and gave me an error message when I pulled up the reservation. I ended up reaching out to SWA on Twitter and they responded in a few minutes. The SWA rep was able to completely cancel the reservation and redeposit the SWA points into my SWA account.
The second SWA reservation (LIH-OAK) was changed from Saturday 6/13 to Sunday 6/14 and instead of a non-stop flight to Oakland, I now had 2 stops in Honolulu (HNL) and Maui (OGG) before heading to Oakland. Since that SWA reservation was viewable online, I was able to cancel that SWA reservation and get the SWA points redeposited to my account.
After both reservations were cancelled, I had all the SWA points back into my account.
Sadly, now I have 0 upcoming SWA trips.
This goes to show that you should keep checking on existing airline reservations, whether from SWA or any other airline, to see if there are any major flight changes or cancellations. The sooner you catch those changes or cancellations, the more time you have to fix those issues. The funny thing is that I wrote a very similar article in February 2018 called PSA: Check Existing Reservations for “Silent” Schedule Changes. If you have any questions about cancelling a SWA flight, please leave a comment below. Have a great day everyone.
That is odd – I have a 6/2 flight MDW to DTW with them (probably going to be canceled, unfortunately, for a work trip, but right now it’s still on the books) and they changed the flight time to 2 hours earlier and did email me. Delta emailed me recently too about a flight change although the time stayed the same, it was just the flight # that had changed.
Hmm, that is strange. Seems like there is no rhyme or reason. Sometimes the only way I find out about schedule changes or flight number changes is when Award Wallet goes through all my accounts and checks for updates.
Yeap. I went to cancel some flights and SWA had completely dropped the second leg of the trip, for both for the out-bound and in-bound flights. No notification. Crazy.
Yikes, that is crazy. Were you able to contact SWA to get them to reroute you or to cancel your reservation?
Successfully cancelled for full points refund after calling in.
That’s good to hear. Glad you got your SWA points back.
After reading your article I went online to check my upcoming trip to Dallas on Southwest. My Return flights had been cancelled and removed from my trip! I had not been notified or consulted about my options. If I hadn’t checked, I would have been surprised when I tried to return home. I called SWA and was completely re-booked on all new flights at the same price. The CSR was polite and helpful but there was no apology or explanation about what happened.
If I didn’t read “Travels With Grant” I would be a sadder man in a few weeks. Thanks, Grant!
Hi Craig, I’m sorry your original return flight was mysteriously cancelled, but I’m glad SWA was able to rebook you on another flight.
Similar thing happened to me. The return leg of my trip in June was pushed to the following day. I called and was moved back to the one i was originally on. Just weird.
That is strange that they would move you to the flight the following day when your original flight still exists. Glad SWA was able to get you back on your original flight.
Right Now Due to lock down flight service and all other services related to travel has been stopped by government so after lock down travel will be safe or not. please tell us
As far as I know, flight travel in the US is disrupted, but still operational. Check your airline website for updates and flight details.