Fly To Las Vegas, Or Anywhere Else, And Bring A Friend. For Free.

The only thing better than flying cheaply is flying for free, and if your destination is served by Southwest Airlines, that just became a lot easier, with the Southwest Companion Pass.

Updated: January 11, 2021

Southwest Companion Pass

Southwest Airlines offers the most valuable perk in the airline business: The Companion Pass. The companion pass allows you to bring a friend with you for free every time you fly. It’s not stand-by, either. You can book your friend’s free flight at the same time that you book your paid one.

Despite how valuable it is, the Southwest Companion Pass is simple enough to get. You can get it by flying 100 one-way flights in a year, but the easier way to do it is to earn 125,000 Rapid Rewards points, the Southwest version of frequent flyer miles. For Southwest flights, you earn anywhere from 6 to 12 points per dollar spent, so 125,000 points could cost you almost $20,000. Ouch.

This Trick – Southwest Companion Pass Fast and for a Lot Less

But Rapid Rewards has a unique feature that makes the Pass much more obtainable: It counts all points that you earn, not just the ones from flying. Earn points from shopping? They count. From dining out? They count, also. From your Southwest credit card? Yup. They even count the signup bonuses.

Thats right, when you sign up for a Southwest Airlines credit card and spend the required amount, you’ll get a large bonus. Those points will count toward the minimum that you need, and when you earn the Southwest Companion Pass, it’s good not only for the calendar year in which you earn it but also the entire calendar year afterward! That means that, theoretically, if you earned the Companion Pass tomorrow, you would have it for almost two full years.

Here’s Why it Matters Now

Southwest has just announced a promotion temporarily raising the sign-up bonus for its credit cards, allowing you to get most of the requirements out of the way just by earning the sign-up bonus.

We think the best play is the Southwest Rewards Plus Credit Card. You’ll earn 50,000 Rapid Rewards points when you spend just $2,000 in the first three months. Spend another $7,000 in the first nine months and you’ll earn an additional 30,000. Including the $10,000 that you spent, you’ll have at least 90,000 points toward the 125,000 that you need.

Oh, one other thing: A Rapid Rewards point is worth about 1.5 cents. Got 80,000 of them? Perfect, because that’s almost $1,200 in value on Southwest Airlines. And that’s before the companion pass.
How do you come up with 1.5 cents? Check out Southwest fares for any flight. Then, check out how many points it would cost you for the same flight. In almost every occasion, it’s a fixed rate of 1.5-1.6 cents.

Southwest Companion Pass – You Need to Know

There are a few things to keep in mind when you are applying for your cards:

Southwest offers several different types of personal credit cards. Normally, I advocate getting the one that gives you the best total value, but if you’re doing this just for the Southwest Companion Pass, get the cheapest one, the Rewards Plus card that I mention above..
Chase has what’s known as the 5/24 policy. If you’ve received five personal credit cards from any bank over the past 24 months, they will almost always deny you if you apply for a Chase card. That rule does not, however, apply to business cards.
If you’ve had a Southwest Airlines card in the past 24 months, you won’t get the sign-up bonus for this one.