My wife and I own a Marriott time share in Florida on Singer Island. This year we plan on going down there the week before Thanksgiving. We usually fly Southwest Airlines into West Palm Beach (through Tampa), which is the closest airport. However, this year we ran into a problem.

We are booked to arrive and depart on Sunday and not only has Southwest stopped flying from West Palm Beach to Raleigh on Sundays, but they’ve changed their schedule and the flights they run are either too early or too late.  So now here are our choices.

Fly Southwest into Ft. Lauderdale (changing planes in Orlando), which is 58 miles from the resort or fly American non-stop into Miami, 80 miles from the resort.  

Since flying non-stop would save us more than an hour in the air I decided to cash in some miles and fly American. Wrong!  When I tried to make the reservation online (you don’t want to talk to an agent since they charge extra for making reservations over the phone), I was notified that the only award tickets available would be in first class, which would cost me many more miles (how many it would be I was never told, though I think it’s around 50,000 miles per ticket!).  

I didn’t feel like wasting that many miles for a lousy two hour flight, so I went to the Southwest web site. In less than 5 minutes I was able to book a free ticket for myself to Ft. Lauderdale and a free companion ticket for my wife. No unavailable seats, no blackouts, no restrictions: fast, simple, easy.  

Hmmm, fast, simple, easy: sounds like three good reasons to buy.  Do you ever wonder why more companies don’t figure that out?