By far this is the best travel deal I’ve scored yet. The Companion Pass by Southwest is one of the most valuable flight perks you can get. It can be extremely difficult to earn if you don’t get approved for two Southwest Credit Cards when they have 50,000 mile offers. But fortunately I got them and now have this amazing benefit.
To earn the pass you need to fly 100 Southwest flights in one year or earn 110,000 miles. Obviously I don’t fly THAT much so instead I signed up for two cards, got 100,000 miles that way and then just spent $10,000 on the cards to get 10,000 more miles. I just received the email that I earned the Companion Pass 🙂
This mean for ANY Southwest flight that I take for the rest of 2015 and all of 2016, a “companion of my choice” will fly with me for free. This could be on flights I purchase with dollars or points. You can only change your companion 2-3 times after you designate them, but I plan on it being Pablo the whole time. The companion has to fly EXACTLY the same itinerary as you, and you both have to actually fly that’s the only way it will work. But this is a pretty sweet deal, especially since Southwest is now flying to international locations. And when we fly to Boston to visit my family, we only have to spend miles for my flight while my companion comes along for free.
The trick is to earn the pass at the beginning of the first year so you have close to 24 months of using it. If I had earned it in November of 2015, it would only be good until the end of 2016- about 13 months total. So I was thrilled to see that we got it so quickly.
Using it is pretty simple and gave me some surprise bonus miles I wasn’t expecting either. The person who earned the pass simply makes a reservation like normal. Once it processes through the Southwest website you can review your “upcoming trips”. There will be an option displayed to “add a companion” and when clicking that you simply type in the information for your companion. You simply pay for the taxes and fees (usually around $11.20) and your booking is made for free- no miles used no dollars needed. Now comes in the extra surprise!
We had already made a reservation for April as I didn’t want to wait too long for flights to disappear or prices to go up. However, even THAT booking that was made prior to the companion pass had the options for “adding a companion”. I called Southwest to ask about this and they said they would simply cancel the reservation for my companion and add him as my companion to MY reservation instead. By doing that we were refunded all the miles we used for his flight!!! Another win for Southwest, no change fees!!!!! That was around 22,000 miles back to our account that I wasn’t expecting. Pretty much enough for another trip for us. On top of that, the prices for the flights had dropped since I had booked. So I asked about that as well. The nice travel agent simply refunded us the difference of those miles as well- another 3,000!
Pretty much this weekend was the most exciting travel deal weekend for us yet! Now I need to find another destination for us as well 🙂
Fire Round the World 