Knowing about a shortcut is like being on the "inside."  Kind of like, "I know a guy."  Well, I do know a guy with a tip--me. Did you just read the news about our new fare sale, and you are wondering how to find the lowest fares?  Well, I had the same problem a couple of months ago.  Yes, one of our great perks for working here is free travel, but it comes with a catch—all travel is standby.  For longer trips, I’ve found our low fares, especially the sale fares, are great alternatives to standby travel.  With a confirmed ticket, you know you are on the flight, and you can check in online too.

My wife and I decided we wanted to fly from Dallas to Portland on my vacation that happens to start tomorrow.  We were flexible with our travel dates, and the fare was more important than the schedule.  We could have just started looking at availability for each day in our “travel window,” but that’s a lot of work.   Instead, I used the Southwest Shortcut low fare calendar tool on southwest.com.

Southwest Shortcut shows you a calendar with a month’s worth of days all at once, with the lowest fare available for each day shown on the calendar page.  You highlight the day you are interested in, click on “Continue,” and it will display a listing of flights for that day.  The cool thing about the Southwest Shortcut is that it allows you to easily select your “going” and “coming” date.  In my case, we wanted to spend six nights in Portland, so by looking at one screen, we could select the outbound and return flights with fares in mind.

This current airfare sale is a great chance to put the Southwest Shortcut to good use, and it also gives you an opportunity to visit some popular destinations in the winter, when they aren’t so busy.  Click on over to our Travel Guide to find one of those spots.  Now an extreme example might be Niagara Falls at Buffalo, but there are also the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland and the Professional Football Hall of Fame just south of there in Canton.  Washington, D.C. in winter gives you easy access to all of our important historical and cultural sights without all the tourists.  Use the Travel Guide to find your own winter “hot” spot because winter is a great time to move about the country.