Oh … my … goodness. Who needs exercise when you do what I did last week? I booked airline tickets for our family trip from Denver to Orange County, Calif. to visit our family later this summer. That might have been the most difficult thing I ever did.
It wasn’t nearly as simple as booking a trip for five passengers. There were a few special circumstances, to say the least. I dare you to try to read this without getting dizzy.
Here’s the challenge — we’re all five going out on the same flight. I’m coming back after five days. Two weeks later, Tiff (my wife), Jack and Ava are coming back. A week after that, Benjamin is coming back after an extra week with his grandparents.
We’re all going on Southwest — I love their flexibility. If you ever need to change your flight or cancel a trip, you get credit for what you spent on a previous flight. Of course, if you ever need to book for a family of five with everybody heading out on the same flight, three separate return trips, two people using travel credit and four people using frequent-flyer points, you’re in for a headache. That’s not even counting the vouchers I checked on, but couldn’t use.
The first thing I wanted to do was book the outbound flight since we’re all going to be on it together. I was through to the checkout screen, but I learned the hard way that you can’t mix points and travel credit without using all of your points first. So, I backed it out and started over.
I checked some vouchers from the old Southwest frequent-flyer system, but couldn’t find any eligible flights that would work. So, I went back to the flights I was looking at originally. I booked my round trip, used travel credit, threw an additional $32 on the credit card and I was set.
Then, I tracked down a confirmation number from a flight that my wife had travel credit from. I went to buy the three round trips for the three coming back at the same time, but I didn’t have enough points (I only had enough for five segments) and I couldn’t mix points and money — all I could do was buy more points. I compared the cost of the points and what it would have cost to buy other tickets and I backed out of that transaction.
I then went and used those points to buy their four flights out to California as one-ways. No cost difference from a round trip. I also used a travel credit I had for Tiff to pay some taxes and called Southwest to make sure a voucher she had used for a different flight didn’t matter in this case. And, it didn’t.
So, those were booked. All five of us heading out on the same flight — that works well.
From there, I went and looked at the return flight for my wife and the two kids she’s coming back with. The cost was considerably lower if she came back one day later, so I went that route, extended the trip a day, couldn’t use the travel credit she had to pay for some taxes (it was expired by then), but locked down their return flight.
I still had some points left, so I went to look for the day Benjamin was coming back. There weren’t enough points to cover the first choice, so we extended his trip a day, too. I argued a little bit with Tiff about what would be the best time for him to come back, but we came to a consensus, I used points to pay for the ticket and just like that, everything was booked.
Two hours of my life I’ll never get back. I have an Easy Button from Staples. When I was done with booking those flights, I didn’t press it.
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