Southwest Companion Pass

For any of you out there who are more interested in domestic travel than international, Southwest can be a great airline to build miles on! Chase cards transfer points directly to Southwest miles at a 1:1 ratio and that’s primarily what I’ve been using for flights home to see my family. Southwest is great for rewards flights because of two reasons. 1, they don’t have a limited number of reward seats on each flight where if you don’t book right away you lose out. If there are available tickets for the flight, there are reward seats available as well. 2, Southwest bases their reward seat miles requirements on the cost of the ticket. So while most airlines have established the standard that any domestic flight within the U.S. costs 12,500 miles each way, Southwest varies. This can be good or bad. It’s bad if you’re looking to book a really pricy flight since chances are it could cost more than 12,500 miles each way. But good in that short and cheap flights (like for me from Omaha to Chicago, Denver or Las Vegas) are often far below the 12,500 mile marker.

And above all else, Southwest offers the lucrative Companion Pass. It honestly sounds too good to be true, but it is. And now is the best time to get ready to pounce on it.

What is the Companion Pass: The companion pass allows a companion of your choice to fly for FREE for up to two years on any flight with you. They have to have the exact same itinerary as you, so they can’t meet you along the way. But it doesn’t matter if you use miles or dollars to book your flight, they get to tag along for free. During the time that you hold the pass, you can only change your designated companion twice. So pick someone who is really truly going to be your long term travel buddy! Obviously this works best for couples, but I’m sure there are some BFF’s out there too. The companion pass is good for up to two calendar years from the date you receive it. So if I was to receive it tomorrow, it will be good for the rest of 2014 and all of 2015, expiring on December 31, 2015. To take full advantage of this offer, you should aim to earn this pass in the beginning of the year so you get almost 24 full months of use. So, I will be hoping to earn it this coming spring 2015 so that I have it for all of 2015 AND 2016.

How do you get it: Any customer who earns 110,000 Southwest miles in one calendar year flying Southwest, receives the companion pass. Obviously this is extremely difficult to do for the average person who won’t fly nearly that much. You can’t transfer miles from Chase over to your Southwest account either and have it counted that way. Bummer. You can also take 100 one-way Southwest flights in one calendar year. Again difficult for the average person. The other option is to hit 110,000 miles through Southwest’s credit cards.

Southwest offers four credit cards, all through Chase (my favorite!): Southwest Rapid Rewards Premier, both personal and business versions and the Southwest Rapid Rewards Plus, both personal and business versions. For about 75% of the year, these cards have a sign up bonus of 50,000 miles each when you hit the spending requirements within the first three months. The spending requirements are usually around $3,000 on each card, so nothing outrageous if you’re maximizing Bluebird. These cards do have $69 or $99 annual fees attached, but they are completely worth getting 2 years of free travel! The best strategy to earn the Southwest Companion pass is to apply for one personal Southwest credit card and one business Southwest credit card. If you don’t have your own business, that can be a little trickier. But it’s not necessary to have a huge robust personal business to get approved for one of these cards. I was approved for the Chase Ink Plus earlier this year by using this blog as my business. I called ahead of time and asked Chase how I should fill out the application since I haven’t made any money from this blog yet this year. They can give you tips on what to do. Click here to figure out how to fill out business credit card applications.

Once you’ve been approved for two cards, you are now in position to earn 106,000 miles just from sign up bonuses and meeting the minimum spending requirements- and all those miles count towards the necessary 110,000 miles for the Companion Pass! Spending the last $4,000 shouldn’t be too tough especially if you just buy a few more Visa gift cards for your bluebird account.

When to do it: There’s no guarantees of when the Southwest credit cards will have the 50,000 offer. They showed up last month and I would guess they’ll continue through the end of December. I haven’t applied yet since I’ve already started so many new cards in 2014 and my credit score needs a bit of a break. I’m hoping that while it may disappear temporarily in January, it will come back again in February or March. If you do choose to apply for them now, that’s the safest bet. Just don’t make any of your purchases until January of 2015- this way all your miles and bonuses will post in 2015 and not 2014.

This deal is just too good to pass up. For me this would mean only paying half the necessary rewards when Pablo and I fly from Omaha out to Boston to visit my family.

You can also follow this link for more information on the different cards: http://millionmilesecrets.com/2014/11/05/great-timing-for-the-companion-pass-50000-point-bonus-on-all-4-southwest-cards-is-back/

More info on the pass in general: http://thepointsguy.com/2014/01/maximize-monday-southwest-companion-pass-faq-and-strategies/