Southwest Airlines deal offers $38 fares for 12 hours

Southwest Airlines is selling $38 one-way summer fares, today only, through its DING! desktop application, which posts short-term deals. The sale started at 7 a.m.  and ends at 7 p.m.,  Pacific time.

The deal: It seems to beat some of the lowest prices out there.  When I checked Los Angeles (LAX)  to San Francisco (SFO) round trips for July 14 to 18 on Kayak.com this morning, the lowest one-way fare was $49.  Ditto for Southwest’s own (non-DING!) website.

The downsides: The $38 fare seems to apply mostly to short hops, judging from examples in Southwest’s news release.  And it doesn’t include taxes and fees, which can add about $10 or so each way.

The travel dates cited in the examples are July 7 through Aug. 31, which rules out holidays. (Southwest says dates may vary by destination.)  And Southwest says seats are limited.  Another minus: You have to download the DING! program onto your desktop, which can be a hassle on shared computers.  And today, maybe due to high traffic, Southwest.com was slow to load on my computer. How about yours?

The bottom line: A nice deal if you can grab it quickly.

— Jane Engle, assistant Los Angeles Times Travel editor

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This entry was posted on Thursday, June 18, 2009 at 10:00 am by Jane Engle and is filed under Airline travel, Arizona, Business Travel, California, Deals, East Coast, Family & Kids, Frequent Flier, Las Vegas, Last Minute, Los Angeles, Midwestern States, New York, News, Tips & Advice, Rocky Mountain States, Summer, Washington D.C.. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.