Anyone who talks to me about using credit card points to get free travel will quickly find out that I love Southwest Airlines. It helps that Nashville is a major hub and the most easily accessible airport from my hometown of Monticello, KY, but that’s not the only reason. The prices are usually competitive if not cheaper than other major airlines, there are no added fees for luggage, and most importantly, there is great flexibility if you need to change or cancel a reservation. If you book a flight with cash and need to cancel, you have a year from your booking to apply the funds to another reservation. Even better, if you book with points and need to cancel, the points simply get refunded to your account. There is no other airline that can beat this flexibility.

I say all that to preface a story of a travel booking mistake. Earlier this year, I decided to modify some future travel plans by adding another city to the itinerary. I had previously booked a roundtrip ticket from Nashville to Las Vegas. I wanted to add a few days in California before that, so I booked an earlier flight to San Francisco and short jump from there to Vegas on the same day as my original departure from Nashville. My intention was to keep just the return flight on the original reservation from Vegas back to Nashville. I knew I needed to modify the reservation to cancel the first leg of the original Nashville to Vegas ticket, but I wasn’t in a hurry to do it. All of this was booked with points, and there seemed to be no issue during the booking.

Then, in the middle of the night, I got an email that my original roundtrip reservation had been cancelled and the points refunded to my account. In a slight panic, I got online to re-book the flight I still wanted only to discover the price had increased to require roughly 20,000 points instead of the 14,000 points used for the original booking. Fortunately, I had enough points to re-book, but I was not happy about losing $100 worth of points (Southwest points are worth approximately 1.5 cents each).

A Google search revealed that Southwest has a system that will automatically cancel a reservation if you double book or book conflicting flights on the same day. There is no advance warning this will happen! After pausing to remind myself that I love Southwest Airlines, I decided it would be worth calling customer support to see if they could help. Happily, after explaining my situation and acknowledging that I should have changed my reservation more promptly, I was re-booked at the original price with my points refunded and back in my account.

I learned a valuable lesson to be careful about booking flights that overlap or conflict, and my love of Southwest Airlines remains in tact!