Southwest Airlines Companion Pass

I believe the single greatest reward in this travel points game is the acquisition of the Southwest Companion Pass.  When we are talking about Southwest Airlines you fall into one of two places, love it or hate it.  However even the naysayers can’t deny the benefit of having a companion travel along with them for free.  There are many different companion products offered by various airlines but Southwest’s version is simply the best.  To acquire the card you need to accumulate 110,000 qualifying points or 100 one way flight segments.  I’m not even going to address the flight segment aspect because unless Southwest is your regular carrier and you fly them with regular frequency you’ll spend a lifetime acquiring the required number of segments to obtain the pass.  However, in a matter of months you can have the companion pass without ever having flown on a Southwest flight.

Timing is critical with the acquisition of this pass because you want the most amount of valid use time while you hold the card.  Starting the process now will maximize your use of the pass.  You want to be able to acquire the 110K points in the early days of January 2014 so you will have two full years of use.  The hardest part of this procedure is the last 10K points and even that isn’t such a struggle to acquire.  To begin, you are going to need two Southwest credit cards; one personal, one business.  It’s best to sign up on the same day at the same time to maximize your chances of being approved.  These two Chase product credit cards come with fees that are not waived.  Currently the sign up bonus is only 25,000 bonus points per card, so I would advise NOT signing up for these cards at this time.  Traditionally, every couple of months Southwest will up the ante on the sign up bonus to 50K per card and thats when you make your move.  Those of you trying for the companion pass should use this time to read up on all the blog information you can find. When I took advantage of the offers Southwest had the sign on bonus at 50K and all I had to do was complete 1 charge on each card and I had 100K points to use for my future Southwest flights.  I did pay a $69 fee for the Southwest Airlines Rapid Rewards Plus Card and a $99 fee for the Premier business card but those fees were offset by all the travel I acquired with the points.  I am still using what remains of those original 100K points for travel today.  Acquiring the remaining 10K points was a little trickier.  You can of course charge 10k total outright on the newly acquired cards but seriously not many reading this have the means to charge up to 10K in non discretionary spending.

You can rather easily pay student loans, car loans, mortgages in conjunction with Vanilla Reloads and Amex’s Bluebird card as detailed here to accumulate the additional 10K.  If that method takes takes too  long  there are a number of ways thru hotel partner transfers to accumulate the points.  Darius of Million Mile Secrets blog details them here.  I purchased a Marriott gift card for $1000 because at the time I had a friend who booked a business stay at a Marriott and I asked if she would mind utilizing a gift card to pay for her stay, that gift card purchase came with Southwest bonus points that counted toward the companion pass,  and for the remainder I transferred membership rewards points to Choice then onto Southwest.  I qualified for the companion pass in May of 2012 and have it active thru December 31, 2013.  I named my daughter as the companion and I am allowed to change the companion up to 3 times during the course of the cards validity.  After our Hollywood trip I will be changing the companion to a friend thru the remainder of the term.  I did get several trips out of the companion pass, not as many as I would have liked only due to the fact that teenagers are busy people and as the responsible parent of one such teenager I just couldn’t go flying all over the place with someone else as she didn’t have as much free time as I had hoped.  I have since cancelled both my Southwest credit cards and will reapply for the same cards in another 18 months (you can churn these cards but there is at least a 3 year time frame between applications.  Perhaps then life will allow me more time to get much more use out of the “prize” than I will during this past term.  With the knowledge I have on how to work these reward programs to my travel advantage I most definitely will be taking the opportunity again to earn the companion pass. Hopefully my life and family responsibilities will lesson and allow me to really maximize the benefit of having a companion travel with me for free.

I stated earlier that I made only one charge each on the Southwest business and personal credit cards I had approved.  The terms of the offer have changed to making $1000 of qualified purchases on each card in a 3 month period.  However, those charges count toward the points total for the companion pass meaning you will only need 8K points after your sign on bonus to reach 110K

I am sure this post has generated more questions than it answered.  And I will address those in future posts, for example “I don’t have my own business, how can I qualify for a business credit card?”  Again, stay in touch , more good stuff ahead.