Even though travel is very much suppressed at the moment, I went ahead and got my Southwest Companion fare this month. I did it by getting a Chase Southwest Business performance card in January and a Chase southwest plus personal card in June. I tried to do a consulting business in January. The plan was to advice small businesses on the best way to handle their cash flow, what business credit cards to get and how to use their expenses to their advantage. Between people not wanting to pay for a service ( even one that saves them 10 times what they spend) and the COVID 19 business shutdown, the business never really got started. I might try again in 2021 and will apply for a different Chase business card then.
If you don’t qualify for a business card, you can still get 2 personal cards. The current promotion is for 40,000 RR points. So, if you get 2 cards, that would be about 82,000 RR points after the spend is completed. You need 125,000 RR points for companion fare but for 2020, Southwest was going to give everyone 15,000 RR points towards companion fare. You can’t use the miles except for qualifying. So, you would still need 28,000 RR points, which is quite a bit to get. Chase has been running some promos where you get extra miles for extra spend and they might run that promo again.
I did find a couple new ideas for getting increased spend. First off, I bundled my charitable donations to coincide with my business card spend. I also had to have a roof put on. Even though the company usually charges 3% to use a credit card, this company allowed me to charge $1000 of the bill with no credit card fee. That covered the spend on the Southwest personal business card.
I have an HSA account through work. You can pay qualifying medical bills from that account. You can also reimburse yourself for medical bills that you have paid. So, we pay the medical bill with a credit card and then reimburse from the HSA account. Medical bills are never any fun but you might as well earn a little bit when you have to pay. For some people the charitables and medical bills might account for a big chunk of that additional $28,000 in spend needed for the companion fare.
The most important thing to remember is for Companion Fare, you need to earn all the points in the year you want to earn the companion fare. You can have some of your credit qualify spend in the previous year as long as you get to the spend amount in your companion fare year.
Another way to get to companion fare is to refer someone else for the Chase Southwest cards. The 10,000 miles you earn counts towards companion fare. So, even though Companion Pass has been easier to obtain in the past, it is still a very worthwhile perk. Of course, you have to be able to use Southwest flights but if it fits your schedule, this is still the best travel perk going.
Never miss another post