A Southwest blunder...

I used to do a fair amount of business travel and I would often fly Southwest Airlines whenever possible. Why, you ask? Because of their great service? No. Because of their comfortable planes? No. I flew SWA because they had what I considered to be the best frequent flyer program around.

It seems that Southwest has determined that they need to start changing things in the services they provide. For example, assigning numbers to individuals in the various boarding groups and dividing the frequent flyer awards into different categories of awards.

I first noticed this change in strategy the last time I tried to use one of my awards certificates and discovered that I couldn't use it on, what seemed to me to be an otherwise meaningless travel day. There was a time when an award was treated like a full-fare ticket. That was the way it was marketed, that's the way it was processed, and that's the way it should have stayed.

Today I went to book a flight with another award certificate and much to my dismay, I find that the awards are now broken into different categories. I can use my current 'standard' award for certain flight times on certain days or I can trade in 2 'standard' awards and receive a 'premier' award which gives me a larger selection of flights and times to choose from.

What this basically equates too, is that I have to travel twice as much to receive the same benefits that I used to receive.

Now I'm not one to knock getting something for free, but everything comes with a price. Other airlines have frequent flyer programs too. I used to have to take 8 round trips on SWA to get a full-fare free flight. Now to get the equivalent value, I have to make 16 round trips.

How does that compare to other mileage programs? I don't know yet, but because SWA has decided to change things up, I'm certainly going to look into it.

Apparently SWA misunderstood the rule, 'if it ain't broke, don't fix it'. Nevertheless, they have fixed it and I wonder how long it will take them to figure out that by fixing it, they have actually broken it. So sad.