Thanks for this! I was able to cancel and rebook to get some points back!
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Woo-Who!
I just double checked my early November flights. It would be an additional 1,544 points to cancel & rebook. Womp-womp
Still debating my strategy for December flights. Probably should pull the trigger soon though
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Re: Glamping
Sounds pricy though- evan cash value. But! Would you realistically ever pay cash for this? Probably not. Would you take a “free” night or 2 there? Probably so. And it would be a very different experience Im sure!
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Thats amazing! That’s more than a few flights (for us) worth! 
Yes, it was crazy! My flights drop 10,000 points each, times 4 was 40,000! They went down to 3,500 each! I also have a companion pass so I can fly 5 people from Indy to Houston for 14,000 ish total. Our return flights are that much a piece.
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Woohoo!
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Yes!!! Careful, Companion Passes always get me traveling more than I normally would 
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You say that like it’s a problem 
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Interesting info for SW peoples:
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I read about this yesterday. I think we’d consider it if we could use SW points and if the value were better than using transferable points to fly a different airline. We live about an hour away from BWI up 95 so it would be an easy trip for us.
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The only issue with this first deal is the article says you can’t fly to Europe directly, have to go through Iceland!
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I wasn’t clear earlier—we’d visit Iceland itself! It’s on our short list for the next few years.
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Turning a LUV Voucher into a Non-Expiring Credits
One thing I don’t think I mentioned in my trip threads was a non-enjoyable experience we had when checking in to our Charlotte Southwest flights and dropping off our luggage:
We had printed our luggage tags and attached them and handed them off to the SW person at the desk. Barely moving her position at all she literally threw our bags across the aisle so that they bounced off the wall and onto the moving conveyor behind her.
I was kind of shocked and just stared at the bags rolling away, but DS21 stopped and said, in a surprisingly even tone “I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t throw our bags.”
The SW employee went immediately to belligerent mode and told us loudly “THAT’S HOW WE WORK HERE” over and over. She was awesome. We just walked away as the people next to us stared wide-eyed at the scene. (Then she turned up at our boarding gate! Good times.)
So, DS wrote a note to SW explaining how disappointing that experience was and they sent him a $100 LUV Voucher. I’d rather have had a normal interaction, but OK.
Issue
LUV Vouchers expire.
And I’d prefer not to have ANOTHER voucher or certificate that I need to remember to use.
Solution
Turns out you can easily convert a LUV Voucher into a non-expiring travel credit.
Executive Summary Tactic
You want to book a flight where the non-tax/fees portion is equal to or higher than the LUV Voucher value and then cancel it, thus turning the voucher into a credit.
Detailed Version
In general, you can do this whole booking and canceling thing in the same minute - so any ticket refundability I mention below is kind of moot since there are rules that flights cancelled within 24 hours of booking are supposed to have an option to refund the charges back to the original form of payments.
But, I’m going to suggest certain fare classes as options to make sure there are no glitches in that process if somehow one does not cancel the flight right away.
With that in mind: On Southwest, your best bet is to go with an Anytime fare, which includes the perks that make any credit transferable to other humans and is fully refundable back to original payment.
I then found a random flight in the future that cost more than the $100 Voucher.
Voucher funds can not be used for taxes or fees, so I chose this $169 Anytime fare.
$143.14 of that total was fare, so would use up the whole LUV Voucher.
I let SW charge the rest of the fare on my credit card and purchased the flight.
Once it went through, I went right back in and hit Cancel on that flight.
Important: Here you want to be sure that you select “Refund to method of payment” in the “Review Funds” section of the cancellation - otherwise that amount would also end up as a SW credit. We want this whole thing to be $0 out of pocket!
One the cancellation finishes you can see I indeed spent $0 to convert the voucher into a non-expiring credit AND made it usable for the other humans in my family if I needed to. (Of course, in this case I consider it DS’s voucher to use as he sees fit as he sent in the complaint and received it. I just wanted to make it stick around.)
As type this it occurs to me that writing this post probably took 4 times as long as the whole SW transaction did. 
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Good thing when you’ve racked up all the points to spend then!
On 150000 points with a companion pass I have booked 24 infividual flights. I still have 35k above this and DH has 75k. Companion pass expires Dec 2025! We have paid the very minimal amount in taxes and I had$150 in travel funds built up that I used for most of it. Our last booked flights to Cancun is where I actually had to start paying out of pocket.
But travel isn’t free!
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That’s amazing! I am so glad I clicked on this forum in 2023. We have done so much more travel than we ever thought we’d do thanks to Travel Hacking.
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That’s a nice deal!
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