Frequent Miler on the Air - How your Southwest Companion can fly for free | Coffee Break Ep32 | 11-5-24

Episode Date: November 5, 2024

A Southwest Companion Pass can be massively valuable if you use it a lot. In this episode of Coffee Break, we'll break down how you can fly with a friend for free using the Southwest Companion Pass. (00:26) - Overview - read our complete guide to the Southwest Companion pass here. (00:46) - What is the Southwest Companion Pass? (03:36) - What are the requirements to earn a Southwest Companion Pass? (04:28) - Which points count? (13:02) - Online Shopping for the Southwest Companion Pass through the Southwest Rapid Rewards shopping portal (14:25) - Hotel partners, or book hotels through Rocketmiles (15:03) - Rental Cars (15:09) - Referring businesses for SWABIZ (25K per business) Visit https://frequentmiler.com/subscribe to get updated on in-depth points and miles content like this, and don’t forget to like and follow us on social media. Music Credit – Beach Walk by Unicorn Heads

Here we go. This is not your typical frequent miler on the air episode. This is a standalone segment we're calling Coffee Break. Each Coffee Break segment will cover a single topic related to miles and points. And each Coffee Break is limited to 20 minutes or your money back. Enjoy. Today's coffee break, how your Southwest companion can fly for free. Yeah, we've long said that the Southwest companion pass is one of the best deals in domestic travel because it can just be massively valuable if you use it a lot.

So we're going to talk today about how you can bring a friend with you for free. So we're talking about the Southwest companion pass. So what is it? Let's start there with a little overview. What is the Southwest Companion Pass? Well, it's sort of like a status that you can get, and it enables you to bring a friend with you for free every time you fly Southwest, friend, family member, it doesn't have to be a friend, could be a spouse, could be a significant other, child, whatever. you can bring them with you for free an unlimited number of times. And that's what makes this particularly crazy, because you can keep taking trip after trip and adding your companion for free, you can add your companion to your flight, if you have the companion pass,

that is, whether you bought your initial ticket with money, with cash, or with your Southwest Rapid Rewards points, you can still add the companion for free either way. In fact, somebody else could use their points or their money to book a ticket for you. And if you're a companion pass holder, you can still add your companion for free. You don't even have to be the one that paid for the flight to add your companion for free. And you can add your companion all the way up until 10 minutes before the flight if there's still seats available for sale. Doesn't matter if it's, you know, you don't have to worry about a fare class. Doesn't matter how much the price of a ticket has gone up too. You add your companion for just the taxes. When we say free, you'll pay just the taxes, which domestically is $5.60 each

way usually. So very close to free anyway. So if you're working on getting your companion pass, you don't have it yet, but you want to plan travel, you could go ahead, right? Yeah. As long as you're pretty sure you're going to get that companion pass, you'd go ahead and book the travel in the future for just the one of you. And then later on, once you get the companion pass, add that person for free. Yeah, absolutely. And in fact, a little trick there, if you know you're going to earn a companion pass and you're concerned that that flight might sell

out, what you could do is book one seat for you with your points or your money at whatever cheap price you want, and then book a second seat for your friend or whatever at the fully refundable fare now. And that way down the road, once you have your companion pass, you can just cancel their fully refundable fare to make sure you free up a seat on the plane and then add them as your companion. So that'd be an easy way to kind of save them a seat, so to speak, with a fully refundable fare. So yeah, definitely, you don't have to wait to book your travel was Greg's point.

You can start booking now and add your companion later once you get it. And once you earn the companion pass, you can, well, first of all, you can change your companion up to three times per year. So you're not stuck with the same person every single time. You can change and bring different people with you. And once you earn it, it's valid for the rest of that calendar year and all of the next calendar year. So when Greg says you don't have to wait to book travel, if you're going to earn a companion pass in 2025, for instance, then you can start booking your travel in 2024 for 2025 and then be adding your companion later on down one. All right. So that's a little bit about what it is. So how do you earn it? Well,

we got to go over the requirements. You need to either earn 135,000 total points in a single calendar year or take 100 flights in one calendar year. Now, I can't give you a shortcut to 100 flights, so we're not really going to talk about that path to the behind the scenes. Right. I mean, that's a lot of flights. That's a lot. That's like- Like two every day, right? Two, well, two a week. Every week, rather. Every week. Two a week, yeah.

Yes, every week. That's a lot. I mean, if you're, if you're, you know, a traveling business person, I guess that would be easy, but for, uh, leisure travelers, that's not the way to get it. Right. And there's no, there's no shortcut to that. If you take a hundred flights or you don't. And so there aren't very many ways to talk about how to do that. You just take your a hundred flights or you don't, but the other way to earn it 135,000 points, there's a multitude of ways to earn Southwest companion pass flights, or rather points. So we're going to talk about the points. I mentioned you need to earn 135,000 points within a single calendar year, and that's really important. You don't want to get confused here. If you earn 70,000 points in

October and another 70,000 points in February. That doesn't add together to be 140. It doesn't add together to become enough for a companion pass because it's not the same calendar year. It's not like a rolling 12 months. It's per calendar year. So you need to earn your 135,000 points all in a single calendar year. Credit card holders get 10,000, they get credit for 10,000 companion pass qualifying points. So if you have a Southwest credit card, you only need to earn 125,000 points in that calendar year. And one point of confusion I find people have often is you don't have to wait until you've saved like saved up your 125,000 points in your account. Like Greg said, you can start

booking travel right away. As soon as you have points. You don't need to wait to have 125 or 135,000 all at once. It's just that you need to have earned that much during a single calendar year. Yeah. You also don't lose them. It's not like you're paying 135,000 points for the companion pass. It's like a counter to show how far you've progressed. And once you've reached that level, you get the companion pass for, as Nick said before, the rest of the current calendar year and all of the next. Yes, very good. So the trick then, as I'll mention in a little bit here, would be then if you could earn the points as early in the year as possible, then you could have a lot of time with the companion pass. Imagine if it were possible to earn 135,000 points on like

January 1st or January 2nd of any given year. You'd have a companion pass for all of the rest of that calendar year and all of the next calendar year. So you'd get two years of companion pass flying if you were able to earn all of those points in one or two days. Now, we're not going to tell you today how to earn them all in one or two days necessarily, but we'll give you some ways that you might earn them within the first few days or weeks of a year, or certainly in the first month or two, so that you could enjoy almost two years of adding a companion for free. That's really the technique and the way to do it. So let's talk about which points count towards the companion pass. First of all, credit card welcome bonuses. There are a number of different consumer cards and a couple of different business cards.

So Southwest has three different consumer cards, two different business credit cards. And so the welcome bonuses on those cards, the intro bonuses, when they say, oh, you know, spend a thousand or two thousand or three thousand, however much in the first few months and earn this big amount of bonus points, that counts towards the companion pass. So because of that, if you were to open one business card, one Southwest business credit card and one Southwest consumer credit card in the same calendar year or meet the spending requirements anyway in the same calendar year and earn those two welcome bonuses, oftentimes those two welcome bonuses will add together to be enough points for a Southwest

companion pass, just like that. That's it. Two new credit cards meet the minimum spent. That's the easiest way to earn the companion pass. And you can time things out really well then, because near the end of the year, after October 1st, if you open a card in November, let's say, or in December, then you're going to get usually three months to meet the spending requirements, sometimes longer. And so that extends into the new year. So you just wait to meet the spending requirement until sometime in January of the new year. And then when your January statement cuts, then you'll receive the points and voila, you've got yourself a companion pass pretty easily. That's the easiest, simplest method is two cards. Let me interject here that just how good of a deal this is, because we're talking about signing up for two cards, meeting the welcome bonus requirements, not just having the companion

pass for two years. You also have the 125,000 plus points. And so those points can be used for a heck of a lot of travel. And then you're adding the companion for free. So if you just think about how many trips that might be just from two credit cards, that's almost fully covered except for the taxes is just astounding. Yeah, it's pretty incredible. I mean, points are worth more than one cent per point towards want to get away fares. And so if you just think about it as points being worth a penny each, if you were to earn two welcome bonuses that add up to more than 125,000 points, which is usually the case, usually those two welcome bonuses will add up to more than

enough points, then you're talking at least $1,200 in flights from the two new credit cards, and you add a companion for free. So if you otherwise would have been paying for two tickets, you can look at it and say, well, really, it's kind of saving you $2,400. Now, I say kind of because it does get a little bit of, you know, once you actually earn the companion pass, then you get the companion for free no matter what. But if you're starting from scratch from zero and looking at this and saying, how much could we end up not spending next year because of it? Well, I mean, you could do pretty well.

So yeah, so it's great. I think it's easier mean you could do pretty well so yeah so it's great you know i think it's easier just talk in terms of like how much travel it's going to buy you and and as long as you travel with a companion a lot you know nick was kind of low-balling it by by counting the points at a penny each let's call it 1.3 you know cents each you're talking about i'm just estimating here around 1500 before adding the companion so you're talking about, I'm just estimating here around $1,500 before adding the companion. So you're talking about, you know, probably about $3,000 worth of travel. Right, right, right. Absolutely.

Yeah. I mean, it's definitely, it's a great deal. Like I said, we've, I've long said it's the best deal in domestic travel because it's really simple to do that. So if you're new to Southwest credit cards, you're interested, willing to open two credit cards, then that's the way to do it. I want to note you cannot open two different consumer cards. So Chase will not allow you to get the welcome bonus on a Southwest consumer card if you

currently have a Southwest consumer card. So you can't get two Southwest consumer cards. You'll need to get one business card and one consumer card. But business cards, thankfully, are relatively easy to get. We've got a video on how to get business credit cards. So that's another thing altogether. All right, let's talk about what other points count, because those aren't the only points. Maybe you already have one of the credit cards, so you're not eligible for some reason. You already earned a bonus. You need to figure this out without credit card bonuses. Or maybe you can only open one credit card for some reason. Maybe you don't want to open a business card, but you'll open a consumer card.

And now you need to bridge the gap to kind of get the rest of the way to the companion pass. There are lots of other ways to earn points. One of them easy way is through credit card referrals. So if you have one of the Southwest credit cards, Chase now offers multi referrals. So what I mean by that is, let's say you have the Southwest Rapid Rewards Premier card. You could refer someone to open any of the other Southwest cards, consumer or business. So you could refer a friend and they could open the Chase Southwest Priority card or the Chase

Performance Business card, whichever of the Southwest cards after they click through your link. So you give them your referral link, they click through, they can pick whichever of the five different Southwest cards they want, and you'll get 25,000 points if they're approved. And you can earn up to 100,000 points a year that way. So that can be an easy way to get most of the way to the requirements without even having a new credit card bonus. Or if you did have just that one consumer card and you refer two or three people, then you'll between your new card welcome bonus and

your referral bonuses. Again, that can be another way to reach the 125,000 points that you'll need as a cardholder. So that's a good deal. If you know a number of people that want Southwest cards, one technique to keep in mind is to wait until near the end of the year to refer your friends, which is a good time for them to be getting the Southwest card anyway, because if you refer a couple of people in December, then they will count against your current year's cap in terms of earning up to 100,000 points for this year. But because it takes a long time for that referral bonus to get transferred over to Southwest,

those points likely won't show up until the next calendar year. So you effectively can end up earning, let's say you're, yes, two different years worth of referral bonuses all in one year. So if you've got five friends, for instance, that want the card, refer at least one of them in December of one year and then the rest of them in the next year. So that's sort of a way to double dip there. There are other ways, though.

That's not it. So obviously, credit card spend is another way to earn points towards the Southwest Companion Pass. You earn one point per dollar on most purchases with the Southwest cards, though they have been running some quarterly bonuses where you can sometimes earn five points per dollar at certain types of stores on up to a limited number of dollars spent. But those points all count towards the Companion Pass. So that's good.

Online shopping, there's a Southwest Rapid Rewards shopping portal. You click through their link to go to popular merchants. Say you want to buy something from Macy's or you want to buy something from, I don't know, some other website. You can click through from the Southwest Rapid Rewards shopping portal and earn a few points per dollar, three, four, five, six, maybe 10. All depends on the store that you're shopping at. And those points count towards the companion pass. Now, if you see an offer like spend up to $500 over the next week and you'll earn a bonus 1500 points, that bonus is like what we call a portal wide bonus that's based on your cumulative purchases at a number of different

stores. And that bonus doesn't count towards the companion pass. But the points you earn from an individual merchant from clicking through do count towards the companion pass. So that's a little confusing. But there you have it. We got more detail on the complete guide. 1-800-Flowers still has a code, I believe, RR22 should give you 1000 rapid rewards points on an order of $29.99 or more. And that's not amazing. And you can only do that up to 12 times per year these days. And there's no way to stack for free shipping, even if you pay for their free shipping celebrations passport, I think they call it won't stack. So you're paying something for those points. But if you're a couple thousand points

short of a companion pass, maybe you want to send flowers to a couple of people and earn some points that way. They have hotel partners, you can link up with MGM and you get 600 points per stay, those do count towards the companion pass. You can book hotels through Rocket Miles and pick Southwest Wrapper Awards as your preferred partner. Rocket Miles offers miles in lots of different airline programs for booking through their platform. But it's an online travel agency. So keep in mind, you won't get elite credit, you won't get elite benefits when you're booking through Rocket Miles. But if you're booking a boutique property or a place where elite benefits and elite credit don't matter to you, it might be worth taking a look, do your comparison shopping, make sure you're getting a good price on the hotel. But every now and then they have good bonuses that could earn you some companion pass qualifying points.

There's a number of different rental car partnerships that aren't terribly exciting, but you could earn some points through rental cars. And then the last thing I'll mention is you can refer businesses for what's called SWA Biz. And so this is a small business program, a booking platform that Southwest has that looks exactly like the Southwest website, but it's branded as SWA Biz. And so it's a small business platform. And the idea is they offer some managed travel services for certain small businesses. But if you refer a business to this, you refer somebody who manages travel for a business, even a small business, and they sign up, then you can earn 25,000 points for referring them. Now there's some different requirements. If it's a really small business, then they're essentially going to require that

business to not only sign up for SWA biz, which is free, by the way, I should mention, but also one of their employees is going to have to fly a round trip or two one ways in the first 90 days. But if you know somebody who has a small business and you know, they're going to be booking a Southwest flight anyway, it doesn't cost them any more to book through SWA because it's the same price and you could earn 25,000 points for referring them up to 125,000 points per year. So you could get almost all the way to the companion pass by referring five businesses. If there are businesses that are big enough to qualify for managed travel through Southwest, they don't even need the round trip flight. Then you'll just earn your 25,000 points as soon as they get into the program. When I say qualify for managed travel, it'd have to be a business that has some pretty regular travel spend, you know, anticipated anyway,

to qualify for managed travel with Southwest. Basically, it's a dedicated representative. So that's a little harder to get. But the one round trip flight requirement makes referring a small business pretty darn easy. So there's a whole bunch of get, but the one round trip flight requirement makes referring a small business pretty darn easy. So there's a whole bunch of different ways you can earn points that count towards the companion pass. Again, you need 135,000 points if you don't have a credit card or 125,000 points if you're a credit card holder. And it's a fantastic deal. It really is. So, Nick, I'm not much of a Southwest flyer, so I don't pursue these.

But how about you? Do you have a companion pass? And is this something you try to get regularly? Yeah, we've had one in my household for basically the last decade. Every time it runs out, we earn it again. So yeah, we've had one for a long time. We primarily fly Southwest domestically. So we obviously use a lot of points and miles to travel around the world, lots of different places, but domestically we mostly fly Southwest and a lot of points and miles to travel around the world, lots of different places. But domestically, we mostly fly Southwest. And it's been in large

part because of the companion pass, because it saves us lots of money and points. And we like Southwest. I know different people have different opinions on their former boarding process and whatever and the seat selection or seat assignment or lack thereof that has existed. But of course, they're changing that. So I think Southwest is going to change in a lot of people's eyes. And that might make the companion pass even more desirable moving forward. But yeah, we've definitely long term had one. And now because we have two kids, there's four of us, we're going to eventually here be pursuing two of them each year. So that way, both kids will fly for free. We find it to be very convenient in an airline that meets our needs out of our home

airport for domestic travel anyway. So yeah, and I every year at the beginning of the year for years now, I've done a quick analysis to see, is it still worth it? Will you still save substantially over just collecting miles and other airline programs? And again, and again, I've compared the same airports and the same more or less sets of dates each year. And sure enough, the Southwest Companion Pass comes out to be saving you over other options time and time again. So it's something we found a lot of value in. That's awesome. Don't forget, if you've enjoyed this and you'd like to get on our email list, you want to go to frequentmiler.com slash subscribe to join our email list,

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