Southwest Website Changed, Southwest Sniping Defunct

Welcome to Southwest Sniping!

Sometime in the last year or so, Southwest Airlines revamped their Website, including changing the Webpages for the boarding pass check-in process. Before this happened, there was an intermediate stage when the error pages were changed to give the error numbers a different numbering scheme including adding a hyphen to them, but the process was still the same. In the site's current state, all the pages, URLs, and the procedure are different, and in ways to make it more difficult to run automatic check-in snipers. For example, cookies, redirects, and more state are used; there are redundant form fields; and the ordering of some form fields is verified. If a Web client fails to get these nuances right, then it is redirected back to the beginning. However, these appear to simply be "traps". Southwest still does not use a CAPTHCA, JavaScript is not required for the process to function, and it is possible to snipe boarding passes; it's just more sophisticated now. There are now also multiple Web interfaces that are used to support mobile clients and the interface displayed depends on the "User-Agent" header. The "normal" site for ordinary Web browsers is the most functional but now displays error messages inline in the page (though in an organized and parseable fashion). The mobile interfaces (see http://m.southwest.com), by virtue of being simpler, are easier to parse, but only one passenger at a time can be selected when there are multiple passengers.

So from this point, all of the previously-posted information is history. I hope the details on the functionality of the new Web interfaces will become available someday soon.

See ya!