Southwest compensating passengers with 25K points each as a goodwill gesture (check your email!)

Some passengers who were caught up in the craziness of Southwest Airlines are getting compensation. If you received an email with the subject line "A message from Southwest CEO Bob Jordan", you might want to check your email. The subject line of the alert doesn't say what's inside, so I wanted to send out this alert as soon as possible. Last week they announced reimbursements and this is on top of that. It is more than four times the original cost of my flight, so it is more than three times the worth of points per passenger. This isn't enough for everyone, but it's still another step in the right direction

Don't worry, if you haven't received the email yet, it's not a big deal. I saw reports coming in our Facebook group a little while before the email arrived in my inbox, so it appears the emails are going out on a rolling basis.

The subject line of the email Southwest is sending is "A message from Southwest CEO Bob Jordan" If I hadn't seen Facebook group members posting about this, I probably would have missed that email as well. Southwest is giving you codes that you need to redeem to get the points, so I wanted to write a quick post about it.

The entire email can be found here.

We had four passengers on the reservation and Southwest canceled it on the 24th. One group member posted that they received 9 codes for 9 passengers on an itinerary, and another posted that she received the codes for a flight that she canceled before Southwest canceled it. If you canceled your flight, I wouldn't have expected to get anything.

It appears that you can deposit points in anyone's Rapid Rewards account, which makes the gesture as flexible as possible.

My initial reaction was that it was a shame to offer codes that customers need to redeem since passengers must take action to redeem the points, this seems set up to cause breakage because some passengers won't see the email or will just forget to redeem the codes I would rather have 100K points in one account than have 25K in each of my kids' accounts, because not all passengers have or enter a Rapid Rewards number, and some passengers prefer to have all of the points in one account.

The email is clear that this is a goodwill gesture and that reimbursement efforts are still going on. I don't think this will replace getting reimbursed for reasonable expenses as a result of the crisis. Some passengers are having issues getting refunds for Southwest canceled travel. I didn't cancel our flight and we didn't get an immediate refunds of our points, but I noticed last night that Southwest gave back our points for our flights. We had paid about 8,000 points per passenger, but my reservation was free as a companion, so that works out to an initial cost of about 6k points per passenger. They gave us 25K points per passenger on top of the refunds, which was already done. If Southwest reimburses me for gas and hotel to get me to my destination and back home, I will forgive them as much as possible.

Southwest has done enough, but those who were stranded in more extenuating circumstances probably won't be satisfied with that. That is understandable and fair in a lot of cases. I am hopeful that those who incurred far more expense will be made whole in the end because Southwest is continuing to be proactive in making up for their mistakes. The extension to Companion Passes and the extra month to finish earning elite status are both steps in the right direction. The issues that caused the meltdown should be fixed in short order.

Southwest promised to respond within 10 days after they received the claim, but I haven't seen an update about when that will happen. When we reach the end of that window, we will know if people have begun receiving reimbursements in addition to this goodwill gesture.