Good morning everyone, I hope you all had a great weekend.  The Easter Bunny took a liking to me and gave me a small box of See’s Candy, but enough about me and my love / addiction to sweets.  A few days ago, I needed to make a change to an existing Southwest Airlines reservation, but I booked it as a roundtrip flight (San Francisco to San Diego).  I wanted to change my trip so that I would be able to fly from San Francisco to San Diego, but return from Orange County and fly into Oakland (I know we have all done that a few times, right?).

Long story short, when you want to change a roundtrip Southwest Airlines flight, you cannot change the departure and arrival cities for a leg of your reservation.  I could probably change the return flight to fly San Diego to Oakland, but that wouldn’t work for me.  I also couldn’t cancel just the return flight either.  Lastly, if I canceled the entire reservation, I would end up paying much more since my outbound flight from San Francisco to San Diego had gone up in price since I originally booked the flight.

Luckily, I have a secret weapon when it comes to making complicated changes to Southwest Airlines reservations… Twitter direct message.  Unlike Ben who wrote Why I Don’t Bother With Airline Customer Service Via Twitter Anymore, I have gotten great customer service from Southwest Airlines, Virgin America, Alaska Airlines, and JetBlue (among many other companies).  I have sent direct messages to Southwest Airlines in the past and they were always very quick to respond and always provided great customer service.  In this instance, I clearly explained that I wanted to cancel the return flight but keep the outbound flight intact.  A few minutes later, my direct message was seen and my reservation was updated.  I then had a travel credit available which I used to book my return flight from Orange County to Oakland.  The entire process took about 20 minutes.

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