I Wanna Get Away™
July 15, 2015 11:32 AM   Subscribe

My boyfriend and I are travel novices, so we need advice about whether this is an OK idea or a stupid plan. (Southwest Airlines/air travel edition.)

We were planning to go to Boulder, CO from July 31st to August 5th to visit a friend (mildly flexible dates and times, but I have an engagement on Thursday evenings that I cannot miss, so I can return home no later than the morning of August 6th). We bought two tickets from Chicago, IL to Boulder, CO for $650, taxes included.

However, since making those plans a semi-important family situation has developed in my hometown in Minnesota (nothing tragic, not mandatory, but relatively urgent/important). If I had no travel plans, I'd take a cheap flight home, be present on August 1st (this is the only day I need to be there, but it has to be this day), and get back cheaply, possibly taking a personal day from work. Not a big deal. BUT, we do have travel plans. And we want to alter our plans at the least possible cost so that we can fly from Chicago to Minneapolis, Minneapolis to Denver, and Denver to Chicago within the same time frame.

We have the following plan:
1) Cancel the Chicago > Denver leg of our trip, for which we will get a Southwest flight voucher for the value (approx. $250-300).
2) Use part of that value to fly from Chicago to Minneapolis on July 31st (approx. $100 in voucher credit).
3) Take care of business at home on August 1st.
4) Pay out of pocket for new tickets from Minneapolis to Denver on August 2nd (there are currently no affordable flights through Southwest, so it would be another airline, approx. $300-400 out of pocket).
5) Hang out in Colorado.
6) Take our original flight from Colorado > Chicago home.

In September we were planning to visit my family for a longer stay anyway, so
7) Use the remaining Southwest voucher credit to pay for a longer visit (approx. $200 in voucher credit, using up the voucher).

The current plan is to maybe try to optimize our out-of-pocket costs by using Priceline "Name Your Own Price" for the Minneapolis to Denver leg of the trip, hopefully saving money, but sadly making our trip to Boulder quite short (it could possibly end up being late Sunday evening to Wednesday afternoon, since you can't choose your time). (We had loose plans to go camping during this trip, so possibly half the trip would be overnight camping.) But the money we spend out of pocket would have been spent on traveling in September, so it's not like we're spending a lot of money we weren't planning to spend.

Obviously flight delays happen and any of this could get fucked up but we're not super super worried about things out of our control, just thinking... are we going to kick ourselves for spending less time in Boulder? Will Southwest even let us use our voucher this way? (We have 'Wanna Get Away' tickets, so you can't get a refund but you can change your flights-- can we split the value over a few different trips?)

The Minneapolis detour is not something I will regret missing for the rest of my life (like visiting someone on their deathbed or something), it's more like something that I will be glad I did and will make me feel like a good person (and which will be personally enjoyable), but if I don't go I won't be grievously missed. Imagine it's something like attending a beloved relative's very casual wedding reception. (It's not this, so no wedding etiquette answers necessary.) Also, our friend will probably not be miffed by this adjustment of plans.

So my tl;dr main questions are 1) Can we use Southwest's "Reusable Funds" to pay for multiple trips? 2) Is this the best/cheapest way to do this, probably? Have I missed some other option? and 3) Is three days a decent amount of time to spend in Boulder, CO? Will we wish we'd stayed longer? (We recently visited Portland, OR, Seattle, WA, and St. Louis, MO for about three days each, and we were relatively satisfied by the timeframe, but maybe Boulder is just like a wonderland of activities?)

THAT IS ALL. Please hope me? (i.e., tell me I'm very great or tell me I'm an idiot who is trying to kill herself through travel stress.) (Maybe this is a totally normal thing to do, in which case I'll be like, great!)
posted by easter queen to Travel & Transportation (12 answers total) 1 user marked this as a favorite
 
Best answer: I think your plan makes a fair amount of sense, and I believe that you can use your Southwest travel credit for multiple flights. I don't think it's that rare for people to have to change things around like this; I just did it in March when a leg of a trip to California got cancelled. It's just expensive is all.

I wouldn't use "Name Your Own Price" personally; airline prices are to my knowledge generally pretty hard to game and I gather you can end up with terrible itineraries or flying on Spirit Airlines. So the question is, assume you had to buy the flight to Denver at the current lowest-published fare. Would you still do this? Or is your plan premised on saving further money from there, which may not happen?

We can't help you decide how much money you want to spend; that is something only you can answer. But if this trip to Minneapolis is something that you're willing to go another $350 or so out of pocket for, do it!
posted by goingonit at 11:47 AM on July 15, 2015 [1 favorite]


Best answer: I wouldn't worry about it. Could you happily spend more time in Boulder? Absolutely; tons. But see the sights, get up to RMNP, take in the views. Consider it a taster for a later, longer trip. I say take care of family business, fly into Denver and drive right up Hwy 36 to Boulder. Enjoy it. I can't wait to get back that way myself. Pack light (they sell stuff in other places!), and just enjoy being mobile and relatively fancy-free for a few days.
posted by Emperor SnooKloze at 11:49 AM on July 15, 2015


Best answer: I have used the Southwest voucher funds like this in the past (i.e. split over multiple trips). Read the fine print just in case things have changed, but it's worked out in my experience. I think the one limitation is that the funds need to be used within one year, but from your description it sounds like this will not be a problem.

Your plan sounds good to me. The only question I would have here is whether your partner needs to go to Minneapolis with you and/or would like to/be able to extend the Boulder portion of the trip by a few extra days. Obviously you guys might just prefer to travel together (which is fine!) but if this event is one that's going to be fun/important for you to attend but not so crucial for your partner, you might go solo for that part of the trip and let him have the extra time in Boulder with your friends there. Or, since you're the one with the Thursday obligation, he could possibly tack a few extra days on the end of the trip to extend his stay, while you fly back early for your Thursday thing (depending on his work schedule, etc.).

No personal experience with Boulder, so I can't comment there. For me personally, this much flying/changing locations in a short amount of time would leave me feeling exhausted and ready to kill everyone around me. But, your mileage may vary -- I think many people would be fine with it and I am sort of a terrible traveller. :) But just something to think about if lots of flying/travel tends to get you out of whack.
posted by rainbowbrite at 11:49 AM on July 15, 2015


Also: DEN is a hub for both United and Frontier and Kayak is showing me direct flights from those two airlines as by far the cheapest. It is extremely unlikely that you will find cheaper fares than this! The case when weird routing can make a difference is if some airlines have extra seats on random flights from point A to a hub and then from a hub to point B, and you can take advantage of those seats, but these don't work when you're flying to or from a hub directly.
posted by goingonit at 11:51 AM on July 15, 2015 [1 favorite]


Of all the airlines I've dealt with, Southwest is the nicest easiest in working with me to make complicated adjustments to tickets and they don't charge crazy fees.

That said, I'm not sure if I'd bork up a planned vacation for a semi-important event far away from where planned to be. Is there a Skype option or other alternative that you can employ?
posted by quince at 11:52 AM on July 15, 2015 [1 favorite]


There's also a trick you can do since you're not flying round trip and if you're not checking bags. Look on United's website for flights to other southwestern US locations (like Las Vegas or Santa Fe or Arizona). Buy a ticket that goes through Denver. From some quick searching, it'll be cheaper than just the ticket from MSP->DEN alone (I saw $237 to Las Vegas).

Then just get off the plane at Denver.
posted by thewumpusisdead at 12:17 PM on July 15, 2015


Denver is a hub for Frontier, but don't fly Frontier. It used to be a normal airline, but it is now more or less the same as Spirit: no anything, charge to carry-on a bag, etc. The money you appear to save on the ticket price is quickly eaten up by fees (and misery).
posted by hydropsyche at 12:20 PM on July 15, 2015 [2 favorites]


A tool to potentially take advantage of the dynamic thewumpusisdead mentions: SkipLagged.
posted by Emperor SnooKloze at 12:37 PM on July 15, 2015


thewumpusisdead: I checked SkipLagged for August 2nd but I didn't see anything cheaper than the cheapest United flights, which were $159/person. Similarly your Vegas fare is $237 per person, more expensive than just booking MSP->DEN.

(Hidden-city fares are usually helpful if flying between hubs: airlines make it very expensive to fly to their competitors' hubs. So ATL->DEN would be great for this kind of thing but since Northwest is no longer with us, I'm not surprised that there aren't any good such fares for MSP->DEN.)
posted by goingonit at 12:58 PM on July 15, 2015


The cost of flights goes up every day you wait -- did you check the current costs and are you sure your travel vouchers are going to cover as much as you think they will? You can't do anything about it, but don't assume the cost of your cancel flight will be the same as your new flights.

I just went through planning an expensive and complicated trip, and I used Google's flight matrix, which lets you create multi-city itineraries and search neighboring airports within a commutable distance. The prices, though, are ballparks and you'll need to go to the airlines website to see the accurate current price.
posted by AppleTurnover at 3:44 PM on July 15, 2015


Best answer: I just this week used credit on southwest. My confirmation email from my original cancellation contained the text "Tkls funds remaining in conf#ABCDE for future travel $109.10" I used that confirmation number this week to pay for a ticket that cost $104. The confirmation for the new ticket included this text under payment info: "Tkls funds applied from Conf# ABCDE ($5.10 remaining) $104.00" (I'm not sure what "Tkls" actually stands for, but that's a copy-pate except for the confirmation number). That $5.10 that I still have must be used within a year of its original purchase, but as someone upstream already commented, that won't be a problem for you.

I am not sure if there might be an issue with canceling only the first leg of a round trip ticket, e.g. if they might assume you are not taking the return. I think SW treats each flight independently, but it is probably worth confirming that.
posted by 2 cats in the yard at 4:31 PM on July 15, 2015


Response by poster: Thanks, everyone. The plan is a go and my boyfriend is on the phone with Southwest to reschedule the first leg of our trip as we speak. I appreciate the advice and votes of confidence!

It does kinda suck to "bork up" our planned vacation, but I'm a sap for family stuff (as is the boyfriend), so we're happy this will all work out!
posted by easter queen at 4:37 PM on July 15, 2015


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