Southwest periodically make flights for further in the future available. Today they have added flights until March 6, 2019. On August 16th, 2018 they will open the schedule until April 5th, 2019.
Southwest has a pretty good cancellation/refunds policy, depending on the fare you’ve booked you’ll either receive a credit towards a future flight(Wanna Get Away) or cash refund (Business Select or Anytime – returned to credit card if you used one). That means it’s often best to book flights as soon as they become available and periodically check to see if the price has decreased, if it has you can click ‘change flight’.
How much further out than any other airline is this?
Most other U.S. airlines (AA, DL, UA, etc) are selling flights a rolling 330 days ahead of time (every day, a new for-sale date comes on line). They publish and sell a “tentative” schedule, then make adjustments to the schedule as they more get information about how well past flights have performed, resulting in itinerary changes from what you originally booked. SWA is usually selling 6-8 months out, but rarely makes changes once the schedule is out for sale. Besides SWA, Frontier (and Spirit, I think) also follow the “chunk” approach, rather than the “rolling” approach. Frontier seems to be a little behind SWA, at 5-6 months out or so.
Thanks! Very well explained.
WN is really the king of short domestic. u cant beat their no status cancel/rebook luggage policy. then getting A List P is even more crazy.