Hacker News Reader

Comment by nikilster | Hacker News Reader

I'm not making money off of it. I just built it for myself and thought I would share

Making money or not, this kind of service is explicitly forbidden by Southwest.com's Terms of Conditions:

"You may not use Southwest's sites for or in connection with offering any third party product or service not authorized or approved by Southwest. For example, online check-in service providers may not use Southwest web pages to check-in Customers online or attempt to obtain for them a boarding pass in any certain boarding group."

http://www.southwest.com/html/about-southwest/terms-and-cond...

Which sucks, because your product looks really cool. (And I'd forego paying $10 to use your service... which is probably why it's banned. :P)

Your site could also compete with their 'Early Bird Checkin' service that that they charge for:

http://www.southwest.com/flight/early-bird-retrieve-reservat...

I think that those are taken out even before they release the check ins to the public.

Correct. Early bird and A-List automatic checkins occur 36 hours prior to the departure of the flight. The general boarding checkin starts 24 hours prior.

Awesome, thanks for the info - just curious how did you find this out?

http://www.southwest.com/html/customer-service/faqs.html?top...

Southwest Airlines automatically reserves a boarding pass for A-List Members beginning 36 hours prior to scheduled departure of the Member's confirmed Southwest Airlines flight.

I don't think we've previously seen someone publicly offer this service for free. It'll be really interesting to see what the company does in response -- thanks for going out on a limb for us all to find out!

Glad to be guinea pig (Didn't really think that anyone besides myself would actually use this when I made the site) thanks !

dude - this is a great idea. i always assume that you couldnt do this because southwest did not open their apis (aka why they are not in hipmunk, kayak, etc) how did you build it?

thanks! uh... I check everyone in manually?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com