Travis is my first new contributor to the blog, who will be writing a post every Wednesday to start. The idea behind adding guest contributors is to add different perspectives to the blog. Travis has a unique approach towards travel, given that he travels almost exclusively with his wife and young children, which is in…
Continue reading: How To Book Airline Tickets For Birth Of Child
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Only "Wanna Get Away" fares on Southwest will tie up your funds in vouchers. Anytime and Business select fares are fully refundable to the original form of payment.
So in a hypothetical scenario where you find Anytime fares that are anywhere close in price to WGA, might as well buy a few with zero risk.
Actually, you could do this with any airline. But good luck decoding what exactly "flexible" means or whether a given fare bucket really is refundable or not. Southwest is extremely straightforward about this.
Polk: I've never booked anything but a "Wanna Get Away" fare on Southwest, so I didn't know that about Anytime and Business select fares. Thanks.
I probably should have started with the premise that we don't want to buy a refundable or full-fare ticket. Assuming those are expensive, it doesn't seem like there would be any savings vs. just buying a walk-up ticket. And if you're just going to buy a walk-up ticket, none of this is necessary....
Same Day Change - United - is free and although not guaranteed and depending on your routing, fare class and time of year, you can potentially do this indefinitely.
Actually travel agents do make multiple reservations for clients all the time. And, yes the airlines have policies and computer programs to prevent or cancel these reservations. But, there are ways to circumvent the airlines' actions. Corporate agencies say they do not make theses reservations, because they don't want to get debit memos. But the reality is, agencies do make multiple reservations for HVCs and they do it all the time.
A much better approach is to use the visit to control the date of childbirth. That's what happened with our 3rd child -- my wife got tired of waiting, so she just told her mother to come. The stress of having grandma stay with us caused our son to pop out the next morning!
To deal with insufficient miles or to avoid annoying an airline with too many bookings, you can combine these strategies. Book with several airlines, just one or two flights each. You may want to use a table to keep track ... but that also gives you the flexibility of finding the best fares. You can leverage miles from different accounts, and not be stuck with credits from just Southwest.
We just tried this with southwest. Made several different reservations earlier this week, and this morning received notification that all but the first were cancelled 🙂