What I Luv About Southwest Airlines

September 29, 2016

I love flying Southwest Airlines. The service is excellent, the sense of humor, the great prices, the sheer number of destinations, and I respect the business model. My only pet peeve is that I always forget to check in 24 hours before my flight. My problem is that I always forget to check in and I end up getting a C-seat. Like any nerdy bloke, I thought I could code my way to a better boarding number. Years ago, I found some python code and I edited it. Then I scheduled the program to kick off exactly 100 milliseconds before the 24-hour checkin time. Well it worked. I got seat A2 for two flights. Then Southwest changed their site and my code was no longer any good.

I let it go for a few years. Finally, I started playing around with AppleScript, and I managed to automate my checkin. It’s very easy to set up a cron job or even have the Mac OS X calendar run the program at a certain time. I was able to get A-seats for a friend. However, this code should probably be optimized. AppleScript is a very easy language and it seems to have some very powerful capabilities.

Feel free to fork me at GitHub, edit and optimize, but please share your variant.

https://github.com/ksetty/swcheckin/blob/master/AppleScriptSWCheckin

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