How to Extend Your Expiring Southwest Travel Funds in 2020

Advertiser Disclosure: We love living points life by using points and miles to elevate travel experiences. In the interest of being transparent with you, we may be compensated from an approved credit card's application, or from some of the products and services recommended on this site. This only happens when you click on our affiliate links. We also earn commissions from purchases made through Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. Thank you for your support and especially for reading this blog! Please see our Advertiser Disclosure for more details!

UPDATE #1: Great News! Effective July 28, 2022, Southwest Travel Funds no longer expire! See below. The following article was written when Southwest Travel Funds expire a year from the booking date. 

Southwest Airlines
is one of my favorite US airlines to use for airfare bookings because of their
flexible change policy. After 24 hours of booking, tickets can be changed or
even canceled without incurring a change/cancellation fee. Any canceled
tickets after 24 hours can be credited as Travel Funds (Flight Credits) that expire in a
year from the booking date. You can use the travel fund to book any future
travels subject to availability and fare differences. 

I accidentally found an interesting way to extend expiring Southwest
travel funds beyond this year, 2020, and 2021 through September 7, 2022.
Additionally, Southwest is implementing a feature to convert expiring
Southwest travel funds into Rapids Rewards points. 

Table of Contents  [show/hide]

Southwest Travel Funds or Flight Credits Do NOT Expire

Flight credits unexpired on or created on or after July 28, 2022 will not expire. No action is required on your part! If you have unexpired flight credits as of July 28, they will not expire and are available for you to use.

It will take us some time to update our systems with this new policy. With that in mind, you may notice an expiration date on your unexpired flight credits. Please pardon our dust while we make this change!

Because of COVID-19 situation, I haven’t been able to use some of my travel
funds earned through
Amex airline fee credits
that are supposed to expire October 20, 2020. So I decided to make a
speculative booking for a September trip to San Diego using my expiring
Southwest travel fund, and hope that the COVID-19 situation will be improved
then. Something came up last week so I had to cancel that ticket. This week
when I went to check my available Southwest travel funds, I noticed that the
expiration date of that particular travel fund that was resulted from the
cancellation has been extended to September 7, 2022 instead of my
previous October 20, 2020 date. Hallelujah, that means I don’t have to worry
about my travel funds for a much longer time while I am still monitoring the
coronavirus situation. 

So what exactly happened? In the wake of the current travel environment, Southwest
Airlines is extending the expiration date of some travel funds with the
following conditions:

• Customers’ funds that have expired or will expire between March 1, 2020, and September 7, 2020, will now expire on September 7, 2022.
• Any travel funds created because you cancel a flight between March 1 –
  September 7, 2020, will expire on September 7, 2022.

So my situation falls into the second condition because I used travel funds to
book a new reservation and then canceled that reservation between March 1 and
September 7, 2020. That explains why that particular travel fund’s expiration
date was automatically extended to September 2022. 

If you are interested in extending your expiring Southwest travel funds
through September 7, 2022, here’s what you’d do:

• Log in and make a new reservation on
  Southwest Airlines website. 
• Use your expiring travel fund to pay for that reservation on the final payment page.
• Wait over 24 hours period, then cancel that reservation. 

Your travel fund should now have a different confirmation code due to
cancellation, but its expiration date may still be the old one.
However, do not worry about that just yet because, according to Southwest, they
stated that:

The expiration date’s change apparently is not an instant process. Although
Southwest wants you to give them 5 business days, in my case, it was just over
1 day period. So after the cancellation, please wait at least another 24 hours
for the travel fund’s new expiration date to change. 

It is important to note that this method to extend Southwest travel funds only works when you use the expiring travel fund to book and cancel a flight
between March 1 – September 7, 2020, because of the waiver policy in
place. With that being said, I would not wait until the last minute to do this,   though. 

It’s worth mentioning that Southwest now allows members with travel funds that are set to expire or created between March 1, 2020, and September 7, 2020, to convert
those funds into Rapid Rewards points at the rate of ~1.28 cents per point. For example, you can covert $128 travel funds into 10,000 Rapid Rewards points. This is an awesome feature because:

• Rapid Rewards points never expire, so once your travel
  funds are converted into points, you do not have to worry about the
  expiration date of the travel funds anymore. 
• You can use Rapid Rewards points to book a Southwest ticket for anyone. Whereas travel funds can only be used to book a Southwest ticket for
  yourself.