What Is Wrong with Southwest Airlines Website – Issue Is Resolved
A lot of people prefer Southwest Airlines for different reasons, but mainly because of its price and quality of service. This is why there was (and still is) a great uproar regarding the fact that the Southwest Airlines website had been having issues for the past years. This is evident in a simple google search, based on the community forums, this issue has been going on for years.
As with other issues or challenges we face, the first step is to identify the problem so that we can come up with a solution that is relevant and effective.
What is wrong with the Southwest Airlines website? This is the question of the majority of its clients who were greeted with an “Access Denied” message when they tried to book a ticket to the United States while outside the country. Southwest Airlines have somehow blocked the access to southwest.com of servers that are not located within the United States.
And to make things more complicated, people cannot purchase a Southwest Airline ticket through third-party ticket retailers like Orbitz and Kayak. According to the airline, they have not tied up with third-party websites in order to keep their cost down. The result is that people who are located outside the United States find it impossible to access Southwest airlines website and purchase tickets.
Southwest Airlines is not the first (and certainly won’t be the last) to implement what is called geo-restrictions in its website. Entertainment and news websites such as BBC, CNN, Hulu, and Netflix have long used this strategy in order to restrict website access to people who are not located within the accepted regions. The reasons for this range from copyright issues to pricing strategies.
Southwest Airlines, on the other hand, have not clearly spelled out the reason why there is geo-restriction on its website. We can only speculate, but the fact remains that Southwest has not addressed the issue satisfactorily, as evidenced by the number of clients ranting on Southwest Airlines community pages.
Now that we have identified the problem with Southwest Airlines’ website, we can easily provide a solution. As with other websites who have geo-restriction in place, one of the best solutions is a VPN or Virtual Private Network.
With a VPN, customers can connect to a server that is located within the United States, and this is the only key needed to be able to buy tickets at southwest.com. The website will detect that you have a U.S. IP address, thereby granting you access. Remember that only IP addresses that are from overseas are blocked, so if you have a U.S. IP address, the problem is already solved. There can be a more technical and detailed explanation on how a VPN works, but this is the simplest, and most importantly, it works.
Steps in Accessing Southwest Airlines with a VPN
Here are four simple steps in accessing the Southwest website using a VPN. You can also check out this guide in bypassing geo-blocking websites.
- Sign up for LimeVPN, one of the best and the most secure VPN provider.
- Open the VPN application and connect to a server that is located in the United States.
- Open your browser and type southwest.com.
- You can now buy tickets or compare prices at southwest.com. Proceed with your transaction.
In Conclusion
People who want to purchase Southwest Airlines tickets from abroad can still do so by calling their hotline. But in this age where people are used to tapping their phones to complete a transaction, calling an overseas number is a hassle. Also, one speculation as to why Southwest Airlines have blocked overseas access to their website is to hide actual prices from their customers abroad. With a VPN, however, customers can see how much they can save when buying tickets online rather than on the phone. People have also been using VPN connection to compare airline ticket prices and get the cheapest airfare possible.
