Easy Travel Points for Busy People
Easy Airfare Strategy: Earn a Southwest Companion Pass
Let me be clear: earning a Southwest Companion Pass requires a little bit of a learning curve. It also requires you to be able to open a business card for a small business or side hustle. Ultimately, though, it just takes two card sign ups! And then once you earn it, it makes trip planning so much easier — you just go wherever Southwest goes!
It helps that we have plenty of flight options out of Chicago so you should check your local airport to see what your route options are. Southwest serves some international destinations, including Mexico, Jamaica, the Dominican Republic, and Costa Rica. They even fly to Hawaii!
What Is a Companion Pass?
When you earn a Companion Pass: for the rest of that calendar year and the next calendar year, you can name a person who will then fly with you anytime you fly and only pay about $5 in fees each way.
There are a few tricks and restrictions so make sure you are prepared before pursuing this.
You'll want to do our Southwest Companion Pass Bootcamp if you want to learn this in depth! The flexibility on Southwest is wonderful and the number one reason I cannot recommend this enough for domestic travel. It is such a relief to cancel a flight without paying cancellation fees if you have last minute changes to your travel.
Qualifying Points
Official rules state you need to earn 135,000 points to earn a Companion Pass. This means that your Companion Pass tracker that you see when you log in at Southwest.com and view your Account page will need to reach 135,000 points in a calendar year.
If you have a Southwest credit card, you will get 10,000 points added to your tracker each year. These are not points you can redeem — they are just making the Companion Pass easier to earn. What this means is that you only have to EARN 125,000 points to get your Companion Pass.
Perks of Southwest Airlines
Rapid Rewards Credit Cardmembers get their first checked bag free (for themselves and up to eight others on the same reservation!). If you earn a Southwest Companion Pass, you'll have a credit card so you'll have this perk.
You can cancel your flights up to 10 minutes before departure. If you paid with Rapid Rewards points, the points are re-deposited into your account for no fee. If you paid with cash, you will get a Southwest flight credit that expires in 6–12 months from when you booked.
Drinks and snacks are served on all flights.
The number of Rapid Rewards points needed for a ticket varies depending on the current cash price of the ticket — but if the price falls before your trip, you can get the difference returned to you as points or travel credit, depending on how you booked your ticket.
Flight attendants and crew are usually upbeat, funny, and kind. One time we even had a baggage handler buy a pastry for our daughter at the airport… just because!
Cons of This Strategy
While Southwest has historically had no airline partners, they are beginning to explore this. They recently announced an interline partnership with a number of airlines but you can't use points to book these other airlines yet. However, for the most part, you can still primarily only go where Southwest goes directly.
Subject to flight prices — last minute flights are sometimes cheaper and sometimes higher.
If your flight is cancelled or has a long delay, you won't be able to be rebooked on another airline — you will have to wait for another Southwest flight.
