A few weeks ago Southwest announced that you could convert your Southwest travel funds to points.   Frequent Miler detailed how it’s a great deal converting funds that expire to points that don’t at a great rate.

I quickly logged into my Southwest account and converted almost all of my vouchers to points.  But there were a couple vouchers that were noted as ‘Not Eligible’ and expired January 5th, 2021.  This was a bummer since I have a trip planned for later in January that I could have used the voucher on.

I reached out to Southwest on Twitter to see if there was anyway to extend the voucher just a couple of weeks.  I’ve had luck in the past with them extending vouchers 6 months after they expire for a fee ($75 if I remember correctly).

Unfortunately they could not extend the vouchers, but they were nice enough to tell me a ‘work around’ to extend them to September 7, 2022 (& turn into points).  Here’s how:

 So I found and booked a flight to Los Angeles that was just a little bit more than the $288 in vouchers I had.  I applied both of my vouchers and paid the remaining ~$10 with my American Express Platinum card to earn 5X points of course:-)

 I then waited 24 hours and decided to cancel the flight.  Waiting 24 hours is key since you can cancel any Southwest flight within 24 hours and get everything back.

After cancelling, I was disappointed to see the new single travel voucher showed an expiration date of January 5th, 2021 like my previous two vouchers.

I reached out to Southwest on Twitter again and they confirmed the process can take up to 48 hours to update to a September 7th, 2022 expiration date.

And sure enough, just 24 hours the new voucher’s expiration date was indeed September 7, 2022 and I had the option to convert it to points.

Need to Knows

• Southwest is allowing you to convert eligible travel funds to points through December 15, 2020.
• Not eligible travel vouchers can eventually be converted to points if you book and cancel and flight by September 7, 2020 – so HURRY!
• Don’t forget to wait 24 hours after booking your flight to cancel it.
• It can take up to 48 hours for a recent cancellation voucher to be updated to a September 7, 2022 expiration date.