The Southwest Airlines Companion Pass is the best credit card reward we have earned so far. We booked $4,110.67 in free flights during the first 10 weeks of having the pass. Yep, for real. As of last Thursday, we are booked for 10 round trip flights on Southwest Airlines. You can do the exact same thing we did. Below you’ll find 3 simple steps to get a ton of free flights with Southwest Airlines.
If you missed our previous post on the Southwest Companion Pass, I’ll give you some quick deets right now. To earn the pass you need to earn 110k Southwest Rapid Rewards points in a single calendar year. Once you do, you’ll receive the Companion Pass. The pass lasts the rest of the year in which you earn it AND the entire next year. Now the fun begins. You can start booking your free flights with the 110k points you earned. When you do, you can add your companion to each one of your booked tickets for free. It’s pretty awesome.
Here’s how you can earn the 110k points to get your Companion Pass. While there are a few different ways you can stack these points with Southwest’s partner programs, I feel like the following route is the easiest.
- Sign up for the Southwest Plus card, spend $2,000 before 90 days and earn the 50k bonus points.
- Sign up for the Southwest Premier card, again spend $2,000 before 90 days and earn another 50k bonus points. (suggestion: wait 30 days in between sign ups)
- With the points earned from spending $4k and the 100k bonus points, you’ll have 104k Rapid Rewards Points. Your final 6k points can come from some strategic spending through the Southwest Shopping portal. The portal will link you directly back to the online store you were going to shop at anyways, but you’ll earn 3 to 10 times the points per dollar spent when you link to it through Southwest’s portal.
The lovely people at Southwest Airlines are smart and realized that people are trying to time their sign ups to earn the Companion Pass in January. That being said, they don’t usually offer the above mentioned cards at a 50k bonus point level around that time. These cards are available now however and if you’re interested in getting a companion pass, make it easier on yourself and sign up while they’re easy to get. Lacey and I didn’t need anywhere near 2 years to fully utilize this reward. We only needed 10 weeks. …and honestly that was just time spent deciding where to go. The actual booking of the flights took an hour. Southwest now flies to the Caribbean, Mexico, Costa Rica, and everywhere in the United States. Deciding on where to go is maybe the toughest part of earning the Companion Pass.
With flights taken care of for the next year or so, there is suddenly way less pressure to keep signing up for multiple credit cards for free flights. All you’ll need to focus on now are free hotels. 🙂
Let us know if you have any questions. We can’t wait to tell you about our upcoming trips that were made possible with the Companion Pass!
Pack your bags! You’re about to get a ton of free travel!
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