Head scratcher on SWA and Early Boarding

I paid for EB back in Feb when I booked our trip tomorrow. I have Companion status on SWA and my wife is my companion.

Checked our boarding positions for tomorrow's flight. I got A49 and she got A19. Both tickets booked at the same time with EB. That is a real head scratcher. She has been my companion on 5 other flights this year and we are usually together.

 

Wow, that makes no sense to me either. Do you think the companion pass had something to do with this anomaly? My wife just earned a companion pass and I would hope that is not the issue...

 

No clue. We have flown 4 times this year so far with her as my companion and the worst it has been is 3 positions apart, but usually adjacent numbers.

 

Something I have read before on flyertalk.com MIGHT be the answer.

As the system assigns boarding, it goes down the list and finds the NEXT available slot to assign a boarding position. Then within a few seconds/minutes/days if somebody with a good number cancels, their position is available for someone else. Then the next person in line that has not yet been assigned will get the best AVAILABLE position at that time.

 

Wife and I are always right next to each other have never had on number between us. We did travel with our son and his fiance once and the three of us with the same last name were in order and my daughter in law was in the B's. did not understand that one.

 

Even though she doesn't always care for my 4 syllable last name vs her maiden name of one syllable, that is what she legally goes by. Again, just confused how this would happen.

 

Just have her save you a seat up front.

 

I really despise people who are too cheap to pay the EB and try and save seats. In this case, we both paid for EB.

 

Well once we (wife & myself) didn't book EB outbound to Vegas and when we checked in she was a bit slow. I received A18 and hers was A36. I boarded and sat in a front middle seat. One person asked if anyone was sitting in the aisle seat which I said no and they took that seat. No one else asked for the window seat by the time the wife boarded. Since it was obvious there were few EB I wouldn't have had an issue claiming the empty seat as my wife's.

 

Joe--payback. SWA knows who keeps all the credit card balances / payments straight and rewards those passengers as they are able. You are an afterthought. Sorry. Just the way it is.
Hopefully she recognizes you when you ask "is that seat taken?" when boarding. It could be a LONG trip if not. Good luck and best of times.

 

I'm with you on this!!

We also have the companion pass and had this happen to us on our trip back home from Tampa in March----no clue as to why or how?
We have EB for our September and November Vegas trips, we'll see what happens?

 

Wife and I are consecutive A positions for our soon to happen (as in 50 min from now) flight. I'll try not to mess up the terminal for you and yours Joe!

 

this was a joke, right?

 

I paid for EB on a flight to Vegas once but my sister was too cheap to do it. 24 hours in advance I printed my boarding pass, then hers and she was 10 people in front of me. I asked at the airport how that could happen and they gave me the same explanation.

 

That is why when sanding in line as A#? And there are gaps, someone has cancelled and no one replaced them. I have stood in line as b-12 or so with no one in 11 or 10. It happens. Note next time in line and note the absences.

 

Try to figure out Ryanair booking policy. It will make your hair curl. They have absolutely no standard allocation policy. It used to be that if you were on the same booking that you were placed together if there was space. Recently they have been devious. I don't play their games. I can survive a 2 hour flight without being seated next to my OH. Sadly, they are doing the same thing with children. If you want to sit beside your child, you can't use the free booking policy.

 

Nostress had the correct answer. I have had it happen a couple times, got A16 when checking in late.

 

I don't get it.

The Southwest site says that boarding positions are assigned:

• Everybody in Anytime goes first
• Then everybody in Wanna Get Away
• Within each fare type, it's by timestamp of the reservation.

It says that EB boarding positions start getting assigned 36 hours before departure. Which means that their system should be running a job more or less exactly 36 hours prior to departure, that includes every EB reservation that exists at that moment for that flight. It should take like milliseconds to run that job for a flight.

If anybody who gets a boarding position in that job run subsequently cancels, then a slot opens up. But that should only benefit either a) someone who books EB after the 36 hour job is run (I don't know if this is even possible, but if it is, presumably they'd snag the highest available position), or b) people who don't check in until the 24 hr mark or later (in which case it's first come first served for any vacated positions that exist).

To be fair, since you can't check in until the 24 hour mark, they should be running that EB job again a few minutes before the 24 hour mark, to throw out any cancellations and move everybody else up. In fact, I don't know why they run it at the 36 hour mark at all, instead of a few minutes before you can check in.

So if you book two EB reservations within a few minutes of each other, months in advance, it's really hard to explain how you'd be 30 positions apart, unless 30 other people booked in between. Or, if 30 people cancelled between the 36 hr mark and the 24 hr mark and they do run the job twice, in which case maybe one of your positions got moved up.

But booking 5 months out from Wisconsin? I think A49 got screwed.

There's one other possibility - price. I always figured price factored in somehow, although there's no mention of it on Southwest's site. So if your companion is paying zero, it's possible she goes to the end of the EB line. But you said every other time, the numbers were together, so...I dunno.

 

Despise me if you will, but if the wife and I are flying together with the dog, I have on a few occasions paid for EB just for me on the return flight (since I don't have the same ability to be on a computer and check in at exactly 24 hours) so I could get us a seat together and start getting settled with the dog. I will absolutely save her a seat and I won't apologize for it one bit. I don't however grab the front seats or the exit row. We prefer to be towards the back middle of the plane.

 

If bigdogmom's friend (Larry) and I don't get numbers together, I have no problem with whomever gets the better number going BACK (on the jetway) to join whomever gets the higher number and boarding the plane a little later, rather than doing the seat-saving thing. Really, folks, it's a flight to VEGAS. ANY seat will be fine with me.