Welcome to Southwest Sniping, the place for getting the lowest "A"-group position number on a Southwest Airlines flight you can find! Here is the main article about Southwest Sniping: /2008/12/how-southwest-airlines-online-boarding.html

Sunday, December 14, 2008

Southwest Sniper result

Hello,
I recently got a pretty good result from using my Perl sniper Cronjob script -- position 18 on the first flight, and position 32 on a connecting flight.

I have pondered how Southwest Airlines decides the position number for a flight connection when they have connecting passengers check-in for both flights at the same time -- 24 hours before the first flight -- because all of the "normal" passengers for the second flight, who didn't have it as a connecting flight, check-in online 24 hours before that flight, and their positions have to be assigned on a first-come first-serve basis as well. It is apparent that position numbers for connecting flights, which are assigned before the 24-hour mark for that flight, probably aren't simply the first ones available before all the "normal" passengers for that flight get to check-in. I have tried to call Southwest Airlines to ask them how position numbers are decided for connecting flights, and although they gave me some basic information, unfortunately the customer-service operators didn't have the information to answer this and cannot find out. (One was interested in finding this out themself and said they would ask during their next meeting.)

I suspect the position number might be calculated by a prediction based on some kind of statistical interpolation of how long it took the user to check-in after their window (for the first flight) opened, against some distribution (i.e. normal/Gaussian distribution) of past sample sets of what position people "usually" get vs. the difference in time between their check-in and their window opening. But I suppose there isn't any conclusive way to tell. I recall that in the past (before I was using a sniper), sometimes I would get a better position on the second flight than on the first.
Of course, don't forget that all positions up to A15 may be reserved on any given flight for Southwest's "Business Select" customers, and there is some policy they told me regarding "Rapid Rewards A-Class" members -- people who are Rapid Rewards customers who fly more than some number of times within a 12-month period -- specifically, that they are guaranteed an "A"-group boarding pass. However, I don't know how being a "Rapid-Rewards A-Class" member affects placement within the "A" group.

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