Southwest Airlines Employee Stole $79K In Flight Vouchers

A Southwest Airlines employee has been charged with stealing tens of thousands of dollars in flight vouchers using the names of passengers…

How a Southwest employee stole vouchers from airline

The St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office has charged a former Southwest employee with stealing hundreds of flight vouchers using the names of passengers, in the amount of roughly $79,000. The person in question was a former customer service agent for the airline at St. Louis Lambert International Airport (STL).

So, how was this person caught? Between August 1 and September 28, 2023, Southwest conducted an in-house investigation, and found that an employee was printing vouchers using the names of passengers. When confronted, the person confessed to the scheme, and was willing to return the remaining vouchers.

Police escorted the employee to his airport locker, where he surrendered 119 travel vouchers, worth $36,300. He confessed to having produced a total of roughly $79,000 worth of flight vouchers. He used the vouchers both for himself, and also sold them on at least four separate occasions.

What kind of vouchers was he printing, exactly? While not explicitly stated, my guess is that these were “Southwest LUV vouchers.” Southwest employees have the ability to issue travel vouchers, which are ordinarily issued when passengers have an unfavorable travel experience. At least that’s the most logical way that an employee could print vouchers in someone else’s name, given that they’re transferable.

Keep in mind that Southwest employees also get space available travel on the airline, so it’s quite something to steal from the airline so that you can get positive space travel rather than space available travel.

This blades in comparison to a previous incident

This isn’t the first time that a Southwest employee has been charged in such an incident. As a matter of fact, this is basically peanuts compared to a scheme that was uncovered last year, whereby a Southwest customer service agent at Chicago Midway Airport (MDW) stole nearly $1.9 million in vouchers from the airline.

Over the course of several months, this former Southwest employee was accused of creating and selling travel vouchers worth nearly $2 million.

This also involved “Southwest LUV vouchers.” The person would use fictitious customer names to generate these vouchers without Southwest’s knowledge or approval. He then sold the vouchers below market value, in exchange for cash. It’s not known exactly how much under “market value” he sold these vouchers for, and how much cash he generated.

Regardless, this latest Southwest scheme was only around 4% as big as the previous one. I’m curious if the person who committed the latest scheme was inspired by the previous employee and was just going to do it on a smaller scale in hopes of getting away with it, or what.

Regardless, it seems like this is something that Southwest would audit, and it’s unlikely to go unnoticed when scaled to such a degree, especially since presumably each of the vouchers issued is tied to the employee’s ID. Also, storing these vouchers at your place of employment probably isn’t the smartest move.

Bottom line

A former Southwest Airlines employee has been charged with trying to steal $79K in vouchers from the airline. It’s how he was able to get away with it for so long, but ultimately interesting it didn’t work out. This is bad, though nothing compared to the $1.9 million in vouchers that another Southwest employee generated.

Maybe it’s time for Southwest to more closely audit how employees are issuing these vouchers.

What do you make of this Southwest voucher scheme?