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Last Friday’s giveaway was a free oneway anywhere Southwest flies. I said I would pick the winner this way:

I want an expensive award to win, but I also want everyone to have a chance, so here’s what I’ve devised.

I will use a random number generator to select three sub-$170 entries to enter round two. I will take all over-$170 entries to round two. I will then use a random number generator to pick a winner from the entries in round two.

I’ll check whether the winner from round two has award space. If it does, that’s the winner. If not, I’ll select until I find an entry with award space.

There were only four entries sub $170, so I used random.org to eliminate one.

Sorry Som who wanted to go to Baltimore!

Every other entry moved to the final round including some very expensive itineraries like a $536 flight from Chicago (MDW) to Orange County (SNA) on December 30.

In total there were 62 comments, I used random.org to pick a potential winner from them. I say “potential” because any comment that wasn’t a valid entry or had been eliminated (sorry, Som) wouldn’t win.

Comment 8 was Anita’s. She wanted to go Jan 17, 1980, $176 (MCI-FLL). But there was no space on that flight.

Back to the number generator.

Comment 18 was from Boaz who wanted a oneway from Las Vegas to Newark in January. His flights were available, and after collecting his name, birthday, and gender booked his ticket.

Enjoy the trip, Boaz.

Hopefully the giveaway made a few more people aware of Southwest’s 19,200 point award that gets you two free oneways regardless of their price.

For more information on that, see How to Exploit the Southwest-Airtran Merger.

In case I’ve made any mistakes in my counting of comments, my decision is final, and Boaz’s award is booked. Best of luck to everyone in the next Free Giveaway Friday.