Southwest Airlines passengers take note – you may need to take pause before booking your next flight.
The popular airline just announced that starting on May 28, flight credits will have an expiration date. Any credits issued on May 27, 2025 or earlier won’t expire, but moving forward, credits from Southwest flights “booked or changed on or after May 28, 2025 will have a specified expiration date.”
Travelers don’t seem to be thrilled by the change of the flight credit policy. “Southwest is now adding an expiration date to your flight credit,” one person wrote on X (formerly Twitter). “They are doing everything in their power to piss me off.”
Another wrote, “Always weird that airlines start faltering their instinct is to take away more things instead of adding more. Ah yes, I now can’t keep my flight credit? Well, now I’m definitely going to be booking with you, right? lol. Nah”
Reddit users didn’t seem happy about it either, with one person commenting in a thread about the policy switch, “That was one of the things I loved the most about SW was the freedom to book a flight knowing that if circumstances changed I would still have a credit to use at a later time. So many awful changes happening at once that completely changes the whole identity of the airline.”
Southwest CEO Bob Jordan recently addressed changes the company was making in 2025 and how they might not all be well-received. “It’s not going to change who we are, or the values that we stand for,” he assured customers in a statement to Travel + Leisure in December 2024. “It changes the product that we offer our customers that they want significantly.”
