canyonwalker, posts by tag: southwest airlines - LiveJournal

Yesterday morning was like the school book fair for me. Though instead of it being 5th grade me figuring out the best combination of books I could buy with my $7.35 saved up from allowance, it was today me (well, yesterday me 🤣) booking flights for trips over the next few months.

Visiting my inlaws in July

The main impetus was that Hawk and I were planning our next visit to her parents. Her mom is currently doing better, with her cancer treatments still on hold (though that's not really good news). We'll go out to visit her mom and dad in late July, catching them while MIL is still on an upswing in health (fingers crossed) and being there with her for the next string of doctor appointments when she gets assessments of what'll happen over the next few months.

Planning this trip was made more complex by the fact that prices for travel are going up. Prices on everything are going up, of course, so it's no surprise that travel is getting spendier. But oddly it wasn't flights that were so expensive. It's the cost of a rental car that's obscene. I spent easily 3 hours exploring different ways of getting to her parents' place to try to keep the car cost to something merely very expensive, versus holy-fuck-is-that-a-mortgage-payment expensive. 😨

Southwest Status Chase / Wild Goose Chase

Regular readers of my blog know that when it comes to travel I've always got multiple plates spinning at the same time. I'm solving simultaneously for cost, and time/effort, and... points and elite status. 😅 In particular I've been working on renewing Southwest A+ and CP elite status.

Going into yesterday's book-o-rama I needed 3,000 more points on Southwest— in addition to everything I already had booked/forecasted— to cinch both statuses. That's just one good, paid one-way trip on Southwest. But the flight I booked gave me nearly 6,000 points. That's 3k more than I needed. The optimizer in me thought, "Hmm, maybe I can change another booking from cash to points and still hit the numbers,." 😅

So I crawled through all my other Southwest bookings, looking for places I could rebook or make other tradeoffs. I found one. On a flight home from Charlotte, North Carolina in August I could cancel a Southwest flight with a poor schedule and book a nonstop flight on American for the hideously low price of 10,500 points per seat. Ooh, I had to jump on that 10.5k fare. They don't make 'em like that anymore. But canceling that Southwest flight pulled 5,000 points off my forecast. That swung me from 3k over target to 2k short. Oh, no, what do I do now? 😰

Southwest Plan Locked In

Last year I faced the problem of, "Dang, I'm a little short"— in December. It being late in the year my options were limited. Southwest offered a deal to buy status outright, but it was ridiculously expensive. I ended up flying a mileage run. I thought it would be drudgery but ended up mildly amusing. I thought I was flying to LA for dinner. Instead I flew to Los Angeles just long enough to piss and got back in time for dinner with my spouse.



As amusing a story as that December jaunt turned into, I don't care for a repeat this year. That's why I'm working to lock in status earlier in the year. That last 2,000 points I needed to make up after yesterday's bookings and rebookings? With several months left to go in the year I have lots of options. I decided yesterday I can do it with credit card bonuses. I just need to shift some big expenditures I was going to put on another card over to my Southwest card— et voilà! I'll now cinch both A+ and Companion Pass by mid-September.

Years ago the status chase used to be a big thing for me. I'd accumulate airline miles and hotel nights in pursuit of elite status with various providers. When I was traveling 100 nights and 150,000 miles a year it made a difference, and I could reach high tier status through my travel. Nowadays it's different. I fly a lot less frequently. I may only log 35k miles this year. And I do still maintain several elite statuses— but most of them are through lifetime achievement (United, Marriott) or owning the right credit cards (Hilton, IHG). There is one airline I still have to get status with the old fashioned way... by earning it. That's Southwest.

About 10 years ago I upped my game in the status chase sport. Instead of just logging on to Southwest's portal frequently to see how close I was to requalifying for status, I started maintaining my own spreadsheet. I'd track not only what flights I'd already flow and how much they'd earned me but I'd forecast future activity & earnings, too. Here's a screenshot I made when I wrote about this a few years ago.



So, how am I doing this year on Southwest? Pretty decently, actually, though I've still got a gap to close.

• I passed the threshold for Southwest's "A List" elite status with 35,000 Tier Qualify Points (TQPs) two weeks ago. My flight to Cabo took me across the line on that.


• An A on Southwest isn't my goal, though. I'm shooting for A+... aka A-List Preferred status. That requires 70,000 TQP. I'm near 41,000 currently. With future activity already planned I'll hit 56,000 TQP by the end of August. I'll have to generate another 15k by the end of the year to hit A+.  I don't see that being a problem. (Though of course last year I said that, too, then needed a mileage run to cinch the last 150 or so points.)


• Southwest also has a separate elite status, the Companion Pass (CP). That's the two-for-one flying I've written about many times before. CP requires 135,000 CP Qualifying Points (CPQPs). Right now I've got 93,000 with a forecast of 116,000 through August. Again, there's some work to do to get across the line, and I'm reasonably confident I'll hit it with flying later in the year.

What's this "later in the year" I'm talking about? Well, right now I don't have anything booked after August. That leaves a whole 'nother 4 months to fly. Hawk and I have been talking about a trip to Maui in December. I'm going to try to book that next week. (I've been waiting for hotel points to fall in place so we can book an award stay.) It's also likely we'll take at least one other long-haul domestic flight, possibly another trip to visit her parents, and maybe a short-haul or two for weekend-sized trips up or down the west coast. Tracking my spreadsheet allows me to plan when to book such flights using points instead of earning points and when to consider another airline vs. concentrating my activity on Southwest.

May Family Visit Travelog #2
Parked at a Wawa near BWI · Tue 19 May 2026. 7am.

It's 4am California time, but already it's 7am here in Maryland. The sun is up. We feel like death warmed over from barely sleeping on an overnight flight. And we're sitting in a rental car in the parking lot of a convenience store near BWI airport, eating a breakfast of a pepperoni stick, a few balls of cheese, a cup of donut holes, and a quart of Coke Zero. (Well, that's my breakfast. Hawk's is less well balanced.)

Last night I shared that we're traveling to visit my inlaws in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania for my mother-in-law's birthday. Well, the overnight flight we took from San Jose didn't take us all the way to Harrisburg. We only flew as far as Baltimore, Maryland. That's by design as H'burg has a tiny airport with only connecting service to/from major hubs like Chicago, Washington, and New York. Instead we caught a non-stop flight to BWI. We've rented a car and we'll drive from here. The drive is about 1h45m minutes in light traffic.

The timing on this is not ideal. First of all, the flight was a red-eye. That is not ideal. But it's the lesser of two evils. The reality of geography and time zones is that flying from California to the East Coast is a tradeoff of either a) burn a whole day flying, or b) get a crummy night's sleep flying. I routinely choose (b) when flying to visit family.

And nowadays Southwest Airlines offers an SJC-BWI nonstop. SJC is less than 10 miles from our house, and BWI is the closest major airport to Harrisburg. (Baltimore, MD is actually closer than Philadelphia, PA.) That means no more schlepping up to SFO, which is half an hour further from home, to fly United to IAD, which is at least half an hour further from Harrisburg.

The second thing that's not ideal about this timing is that right now it's 7am. On a weekday. That means rush hour traffic. That's not a huge deal, really. It just means the drive will take longer. And that's partly why we're taking a quick breakfast break right now, at 7am, at a Wawa convenience store near BWI. We're tanking up here on food and drink before we hit the road to Harrisburg.

Mexico Quickie Travelog #2
Rolling to Cabo San Lucas, MX · Tue, 12 May 2026. 1pm.

We had a relatively easy trip to Los Cabos today. Although it did start early with a 5:45am wakeup our flight out of San Jose left on time. Actually, I think it left a few minutes early. There were a lot of empty seats, so that helped things flow quicker at the gate. That was just the first leg of our trip. We had a connection at SNA (Orange County).

U-Turn and a Bacon Cheeseburger at John Wayne

As we left for SNA I checked my flight app to see if our connecting flight was tracking on time. Part of that is checking if the flight that's bringing the aircraft inbound is on time. There I saw "SJC - SNA" and timings. Our timings. We'd be exiting our flight and at John Wayne airport, turning right around, and reboarding the same aircraft!

I took advantage of having a few minutes on the ground at SNA to hit the Carl's Jr. near the Southwest gates. It's not that I was super hungry, but there it was 9:30 and I figured I might not have lunch until 3:30 so I wanted something. And why have just something when I can have a western bacon cheeseburger? Mmm, mmm. Oh, and because I'm on Ozempic I ordered only a single western bacon cheeseburger, not a double, and no fries. It's my "eat two-thirds" discipline... except today was more like eat half. It works.

I wolfed the food to make it back to the gate in time for (re-)boarding. I need not have rushed as the connecting flight was delayed. Clearly it wasn't that we lacked an aircraft. 🤣 It's that we lacked pilots. They crew-changed us, and while the new flight attendants arrived on time— and were waiting in front of the locked door to the jetbridge with the rest of us— the new pilots were delayed.

What if Security Freaks Didn't Make Travel Suck?

Although we were late getting off the blocks from SNA we arrived into SJD pretty much on time. It was scheduled as a 2h15m flight and didn't take that long. Once we got rolling things were smooth.

Things were smooth at SJD, too— surprisingly smooth, for international arrivals. I mean, first there was this little number....



The Southwest flights at SJD don't use jet bridges. Apparently Southwest cheaped out on the rent. That meant exiting the aircraft by descending stairs— I always imagine I'm The Beatles waving to paparazzi— and walking across the tarmac to a bus to the terminal. That actually went a tad faster than I expected, but it dropped us off into the part of international travel that's often the worst: Immigration and Customs.

In the US Hawk and I have had Global Entry for going on 10 years now. That speeds up our return home through immigration— in theory. In practice we've occasionally stood beneath banners touting, "No paperwork, no lines!" waiting in a literal line with literal paperwork in our hands. "Mission Accomplished!" I guess.

In Mexico we have no such fast-track benefits. Except nowadays... it doesn't matter. Mexico's immigrations and customs checks are fast. Even for people with nobody status in Mexico.

Have a Drink for the Road. Or Five.

Past immigrations and customs at SJD is a hall repeat travelers call "the shark tank". It's a room full of touts, shills, liars, and thieves who all misrepresent themselves as taxi starters and shuttle coordinators. They're actually all time-share conmen, I'm told. WE bypassed them and walked outside.



The next curious thing about SJD is that one you walk outside you're in the bar zone. Like, there are two bars right at the exit doors, one to the right and one to the left. You don't even have to walk across the street. Then, across the street, are two or three more bars. Those you can see in the photo above. They're opposite the area where all the shuttle drivers and coordinators— the real ones, not the scammy time-share liars— meet arriving passengers.

"Why not call an Uber and not worry about who's a scammer?" you might ask. Ah, easy answer. Uber and other ride-hailing services are banned by federal law from picking up passengers at the airport. Apparently the scammers have paid off the authorities better than Uber, et. al. ever will. And these federal police, once bought, are fiercely loyal. I read that Uber drivers face a $2,500 (US!) fine and confiscation of their vehicle if the heavily armed federales wish to make an example of them.

Well, we skipped the bars and found our shuttle coordinator. After a few minutes of waiting a driver pulled up in a Chevy Suburban. For just the two of us.



And there's more beer in the car, BTW!

Oh, and that's a picture of my second car beer. Since it was already my third drink of the day (I had a bourbon on the connecting flight) I figured I should switch to light beer. I like Pacifico so I figured I'd give Pacifico Light a try. It's... very light. "This is sex in a canoe," I quipped to Hawk. Then I checked the can and noticed it's just 3% ABV. Yup, that's light. I think from now on I'll switch to real beer. When I want something fucking close to water, I'll drink water.

Ohio Waterfalls Travelog #2
37,000' over Arizona · Thu, 16 Apr 2026. 12:30pm

As I boarded our connecting flight in San Diego this morning two cool things happened. First, I got my favorite seat on Southwest Airlines, an exit row aisle, without worrying about being at the front of the boarding queue.



That's because Southwest switched to assigned seats a few months ago. I was skeptical about the change ahead of time. I've got to say the rollout is going much better than I expected. And— so far, with the benefit of elite status— I've been able to choose good seats at booking time every time.

This flight I relaxed in the boarding area— which at SAN is newly larger and modern thanks to a just-completed reservation— until Group 1 was called to board. Then I joined the end of the Group 1 queue. Yay, more time sitting, less time standing in line.

The second cool thing about this flight involves the seats themselves. You'll notice that light blue accent on the seats.... That's a new design I encountered for the first time today. And the redesign is more than cosmetic.



Low on the seat backs, where there's long been a webbed area that can hold small items like a little water bottle, there are now two little pockets perfectly sized to hold a cell phone. This is great for when you want to put your cellphone down but not in a pocket. Perhaps because you've got it on a charger. By being perfectly sized these pockets make it less likely you'll forget your cellphone when it falls to the bottom of that bigger pocket. I know, because I once forgot my laptop there! 😳



The other nifty thing is also for cellphones. It's a little shelf, above the tray table, for resting your cellphone. Ribs in the rubberized pad allow you to position your phone at different angles, and oriented vertically or horizontally, for watching vide while you fly. Yay, no more having to balance my phone in my hand while watching a movie!

Spring Family Visit Travelog #11
30,000' over West Virginia · Sun 5 Apr 2026. 4pm.

We're headed home from visiting my inlaws for the past week. We wrapped up the visit this morning with discussion about coming back out in May! Then it was time to hit the road.

BWI airport was just 90 minutes away by car. Traffic was overall like on this Easter Sunday though there were a few slow-downs when the rain fell heavily and for one traffic accident (likely caused by the former). We thought about stopping for lunch outside the airport but decided instead to go all the way to the airport and take our chances on food there.

At BWI we had plenty of time before our flight. We planned it that way. One thing I learned from years of business travel is not to cut it close on the schedule. It's better to plan time at the airport and how to make it relaxing or productive. In this case relaxation was fine. We took our time eating food court quality lunch. I had Subway, Hawk had a chicken quesadilla that was freshly made but served with Heinz salsa. I didn't even know Heinz made salsa! They probably only distribute it to airport food courts, because that's how good it is.

The airport was un-busy for a Sunday, likely again because of the holiday. And our flight home this afternoon has a lot of empty seats, too. I haven't had a flying experience this uncrowded since, I think, 2012. Oh, and...



Okay, so we're not landing yet. We're only as far as West Virginia, maybe eastern Kentucky, and I don't know if we'll land early. But we left on time, and that's still what it feels like!

Update: We did land 20 minutes early!

San Diego SKO travelog #8
Back home · Thu, 12 Feb 2026. 9pm.

I left SKO early today. No, I don't just mean I snuck out before the last session of the day, which wasn't relevant to me anyway— not that any of this is relevant to me anymore. I also left a day early. No, tomorrow's not another seminar day. Today's the end of the program. But we were all asked to book flights home tomorrow morning, not today. I changed my flight late last night to leave this evening, a 6:40pm departure, instead of Friday morning.

I should have made that change a week ago. It would've been cheaper. As it was it cost the company $215 to change. A week ago it would've cost just $106. And the company could've save the last night of hotel cost. I held onto my plan of leaving Friday as long as I did because they asked me to. 99% of the reason for that, I am sure, was to stop people from booking 5pm or even 3pm departures today and then melting away at lunchtime, wrecking the second half of today's program. Of course, at least three people conspicuously did book 2-3pm departures and leave at lunch. But the idea was also that we'd have a group dinner tonight. And that's what I decided last night IDGAF about.


Flying to/from San Diego is a more pleasant experience than it used to be. SAN T1 has been rebuilt, with the new T1 opening late last year. The new T1 is beautiful. (At least on the inside.)  And it's spacious.



The old T1 had most of its gates crammed in a rotunda we frequent flyers affectionately called The Wheel of Death. The rotunda was a great idea... 58 years ago. The last time it was still a good idea was... maybe back in the 1980s... or whenever passenger traffic was 1/4 of what it is today.

Despite the spacious new T1 there are some things that don't change....



Yup, my flight home on Southwest was late. We were about 30 minutes late on departure. We landed only 10 minutes late, though, because airlines pad their flight schedules expecting delays. Do the math.... Southwest expected this flight to have a 20 minute delay.


I got home this evening at 8:40pm. On the one hand that's not hugely different from getting home tomorrow at 11:40am. I mean, it's not even a full day. But it is a full night. I'm glad I'm home to sleep in my own bed tonight, next to my spouse, instead of sleeping yet-another night in a soulless hotel room after a dull drinking party with colleagues I soon will never see or even work with again.

San Diego SKO travelog #2
38,000' over California · Mon, 9 Feb 2026. 11am.

Today was my first flight with Southwest since they changed away from their most signature policy, the thing that identified them and differentiated them for over 50 years: no assigned seats. Just under two weeks ago Southwest moved to an assigned-seats model, making them like virtually every other commercial airline under the sun.

I wasn't sure what it'd be like flying with them so soon after the changeover. Honestly I expected that it'd be chaos, with many customers not understanding the change and harangued employees not able to keep up. I expected to find someone already in my primo seat, telling me, "Well, I'm sitting here already, pick another seat."

So, how was it?

There were goods and bads. Here are Five Things:

• The numbered metal stanchions we Southwest flyers are all familiar with from the past 20 years were already gone, replaced with just two boarding lanes. There are 8 boarding groups, numbered 1 through 8, and the two lanes have screens above them that display alternating numbers. In addition to this there were two other lanes, one of them for preboards and the other for "priority" passengers. The signs do not identify what constitutes a priority passenger. Apparently many people assumed it was a self assessment; I noted with some dismay that there were at least 20 people queued up for the priority lane. By contrast there were only 3 of us in the Group 1 lane.


• The gate agents are more assertive about line order now than before. I watched the agent refuse boarding to fully two-thirds of the people queued up in the "priority" lane. Evidently just because you think you're a priority doesn't mean Southwest agrees. 🤣 It's ironic, though, the agents are such sticklers for boarding order now, as boarding earlier than you're entitled means way less with assigned seats than it did for the 50+ years when seats were first-come, first-chosen.


• There were way fewer medical preboards than usual for southwest. There were only 2 out of 150+ passengers. Typically there'd be at least 8 on a busy weekday morning flight like this. It seems like moving to assigned seats has, as expected, reduced the problem of "fake" preboarders gaming the system.


• On the whole the boarding process went smoothly, with passengers figuring out how assigned seats work. I didn't hear any "Excuse me, you're in my seat" misunderstandings. Of course, anybody who's flown any other airline already knows this.


• The one place where we got tripped up on boarding, which resulted in us leaving over 10 minutes late, was running out of bin space for carry-on bags. Some 8-10 people spent a looong time trying to shove their bags in multiple places where they didn't fit. The gate agents needed to be more assertive about asking people to gate-check their bags before boarding. Usually they are, so probably what happened with this flight was a fluke.

I'm more satisfied with Southwest's change to assigned seats than I thought I'd be. We'll see how often I can keep scoring good seats, though, especially when I have to book just a few days out instead of weeks in advance.

Monday night this week was the end of an airline industry era. Southwest Airlines launched its last flight operating with its Open Seating policy. For 54 years prior to 26 January 2026, Southwest was the only major US carrier to allow passengers to choose any open seat on the aircraft (within a few minor restrictions for safety) as they boarded.

The change was announced well in advance, in 2024. I wrote about it at the time. I was unimpressed. While some infrequent travelers believed the PR spin about how this would "be better for customers" and repeated word-of-mouth stories about how it would eliminate "the scrum at the gate" or "the problem with fake wheelchair users", I viewed it in the terms Southwest's investors, board of directors, and executives discussed it with each other: a ploy to extract more profit from customers.

As for those two semi-myths I mentioned....

• "The scrum at the gates", sometimes also called "The Southwest cattle call" refers to passengers crowding in at the gate to board earlier to get better choice of seats. These criticisms miss two important things: One, this vision of the problem is from twenty years ago, before Southwest changed to individually assigned numbers for boarding. Two, all other airlines in the US have the problem of people crowding the gate area to be at the front of their group 1-2-3-4-etc. designations. Southwest was no worse than, and was actually generally better than, all other US airlines in this regard.


• "Fake wheelchair users" was arguably a legit problem, though how much of a problem is subject to individual interpretation. The situation was that Southwest, in compliance with federal law, had to allow passengers who claimed a physical handicap to board first so they could get seats that met their needs. Many people who used this privilege genuinely needed it. But some number of pre-boarders arguably were people gaming the system, claiming handicap— which Southwest was, by law, not allowed to question— to get better seats. The common "proof" cynics pointed to was how many people required wheelchairs to board a flight but walked off. These were sneeringly called "Jesus flights"— as if Jesus had healed the crippled in the air. The problem with this interpretation is that cynics are assuming anyone who needs a wheelchair some of the time but not all of the time is faking it. This is a deeply unfactual, and deeply insulting, misunderstanding of physical handicap.

So, with those two misconceptions out of the way, what's left for the rest of us? Aside from higher effective prices as Southwest becomes yet-another airline charging ancillary fees for everything beyond a basic ticket? (Remember: this change is about more profits, not better customer experience.)


For me, as a frequent flyer, it's a loss of a seating system that worked.

Southwest's no-assigned-seats policy worked great for me as a passenger who 1) routinely has to book travel with one week notice or less— because that's the typical reality of my business travel— and 2) has elite status.

Having elite status on other airlines doesn't work so well when booking one week out or less. Why? Because all the good seats are sold by then! For example, that happened when I had to fly to New York on a Monday (busy day for business travelers) last March. I booked Southwest instead, taking a connection in Denver instead of the time-savings of a nonstop flight, because their no-assigned-seats policy meant I could get a great seat as long as I had a low boarding number— which I always have, thanks to elite status.

Booking more than 1 week ahead doesn't necessarily solve the problem. When we flew to Rome in May we booked 6 weeks in advance and still found nothing but middle seats left. If Southwest flew to Europe I would've given serious consideration to flying them instead so we could get better seats.

But now that era is over. Soon, I am afraid, good seats will be just as elusive on Southwest as on United. Even for a traveler with elite status.

After feeling like "All I've done is eat. And visit one customer," yesterday today I've visited another customer. And sat down to eat again. 😅 At least the ratio is decreasing: one customer visit, one restaurant meal before or after, not three.

Also decreasing is the ratio of meetings about meetings. That's almost entirely attributable to us not having our bosses want to get involved in this one. More people who want to be involved (and have strong opinions about how the meeting should be run) equals more meetings. Today it was just Sandi and I visiting a customer. We chatted briefly about it last night over dinner, aligned on a strategy, and agreed on one small task each we'd do independently to prepare. This morning there was no need for another prep meeting. So we didn't need to meet for breakfast. In fact, both of us still kind of full from yesterday, we both at a meal of a protein bar in our rooms. 🤣 And the meeting went beautifully despite our lack of 3 planning calls to prepare for it.

After the client meeting we went to a nearby restaurant for lunch. That, thankfully, wasn't a meeting so much as "We both need lunch, let's eat here rather than go to the airport and pay more for worse food there."

Now I'm at the airport. I'm plenty early for my flight... which is already falling behind schedule.



Yup, 30 minutes earlier this flight was tracking on time; now that I'm at the airport and through security, it's late. But, oh, UPDATE: now it's only 26 minutes late. A few minutes ago it was running further behind. The plane's now in the air en route to PHX so now there are fewer things that could go wrong to change the schedule.