The Southwest Companion Pass – GREATEST deal in travel!

• What is the Southwest Companion Pass?
• How do you get the Southwest Companion Pass? 
• After you receive your Southwest Companion Pass.
• How we earned our pass and started using it.
• Surprise: Hawaii!
• Let’s Get to the Point!

What is the Southwest Companion Pass?

Southwest Airlines, one of my very favorites, has one of the best deals in travel – the Southwest Companion Pass! In December 2017, I came upon a blog about the Southwest Companion Pass. At the time, I had no idea what that meant, but I knew that I had to know more. I spent hours and hours researching and learning everything that I could.  How could something SO valuable have eluded me?  How could I have never heard of this tremendous perk?  

A girl on a mission, for the GREATEST deal!

I made it my mission to acquire this most-coveted pass! This, my friends, is what set me on the path to travel….and to see the world.  The Southwest Companion Pass is a pass that you earn when you acquire 125,000 points with any of the Southwest Airlines co-branded credit cards.  Once you’ve earned the pass, you can designate ANYONE to be your companion, and they will fly everywhere you fly, ABSOLUTELY FREE (minus the $5.60 tax fee per leg of each trip).

How do you get the Southwest Companion Pass?

There are a few ways to earn the Southwest Companion Pass.  The easiest way, for sure, is to choose from one of Southwest co-branded credit cards. There are lots of them, including a business card, that will give you 80,000 points after spending $5,000 in three months.  Once you’ve acquired 125,000 points, you will earn the Companion Pass. The good news is that you earn this pass for the current year, as well as the following year.  If you time it just right, you could have this pass for almost two full years.

After you receive your companion pass.

As soon as your Companion Pass has arrived, you’ll want to designate whomever you choose as your companion.  However, keep in mind this amazing benefit of the Companion Pass:  you can change your companion up to three times in a calendar year!  This is especially valuable when you want to spice up your travel schedule, or throw in some weekend getaways.  

Here’s a good example:

In a few weeks, for example, Daddy Starbucks and I will be traveling to NYC for our 27^th Anniversary.  Then again this fall, the whole family will be flying to Riverwalk, in San Antonio, Texas, for some R & R (and to review some hotels and attractions for the blog) . . .  again paying only taxes!  I’ll be sharing, in the coming days, exactly how to book your Southwest flights, as well as how to book your companion’s flight and make the most of the Companion Pass’ features.

How we earned our pass and how we started using it.

I have a photography business on the side.  I also do freelance administrative work out of my home office. As well, I frequently sell items on Ebay.  Any of those three qualify me to receive a business credit card.  In fact, all of them qualify for multiple business cards, but we’ll get to that later.  

The information listed below was from a post in 2018 (and the credit card offers have changed), but I wanted you to see how WE earned our Companion Pass.

Initially, I applied for a Southwest Business Card, spent $3,000 within the 3-month requirement and earned 60,000 Southwest Rapid Reward points.  I then applied for the Southwest personal credit card, spent another $2,000 within the 3-month requirement and earned 50,000 Southwest Rapid Reward points. The 60K combined with the 50K points gave me the necessary 110,000 points required to earn the Companion Pass (again, this was two years ago).

**To earn a companion pass today, you must accumulate 125,000. **

Then what?

All I had to do now was designate my companion.  I added my oldest daughter.   My husband repeated the exact same process, added our eldest son, and by March of 2018, we had both earned a Southwest Companion Pass.  Here’s the kicker though – we didn’t have to exchange our earned points for the Pass – we got to keep all those points to spend on flights!!  

What will we do with all those points?

So now we had 230,000 points (110,000 each, plus the 5,000 points each that we spent on the card to meet the minimum required spending threshold).  AND the Companion Pass was good for the entire year that we earned it, as well as all of 2019.

Later that May, just two months later, our entire family of six flew to Orlando, FL, met some precious friends from Australia, and spent an entire week at Universal Studios.  We did have to pay the taxes for that trip, which we’re $5.60 per person/per way, so our entire flight cost us $67.20.  Also, I was able to get in on some really great point deals on our flight from Nashville to Orlando, when the point cost was only 5,250 points each way.  Since we had two companion passes, we only had to pay the points for four passengers, as two flew completely free (minus that $11.20/pp fee for taxes).  Our entire trip cost us 42,000 Southwest points, leaving us with 188,000 points for our next adventure – and with still 18 months before our companion passes expired.  

Surprise: Hawaii!

Now up until this point, I thought it would be fun to travel all over the USA.  Because we homeschool, what better way to share our country’s rich heritage than to visit all the historical places and see as many National Parks as possible.  Around this time though, Southwest had decided to fly to Hawaii.  Daddy Starbucks and I decided that if we’re ever going to get to Hawaii, a tippy top bucket list place, now was the time.  So we waited for flights to be released.  We waited and waited and waited some more. In October, we were told that flights would be released in November.  In November, it would be December.  

So….

To make this blog a little shorter, I will tell you that we finally were able to book our flights in late February, 2019. In fact, I was one of the few that got in on the $49 fares from Maui to Oakland, CA.  Those fares were available for two hours!!  Yep, it cost us 1,950 points to fly from Maui, HI, to Oakland, CA.  Since we live in Nashville though, how did we get out to sunny California?   

Here’s how we did it…

When Southwest first made the big announcement that they’d be flying Aloha, one of the cities that they announced was San Diego.  San Diego is one of our favorite cities in California, so I had already booked our round-trip flights from Nashville to San Diego.  And boy am I thankful I did.  It ended up working out really well for us, because we had a quick (and direct) four-hour flight, spent the night in the beautiful Hyatt Regency on Mission Bay, and left the next morning for our two-week adventure. 

Let’s Get to the Point!

The Southwest Companion Pass is one of the greatest deals in travel.  Anyone can earn it.  So many of my friends have small businesses on the side to earn extra money.  Some of those include DoTerra, Plexus, Norwax, Mary Kay, etc…. even if you sell products on eBay, or Etsy!  Any of these (and so many more) allow you to apply and receive a business credit card.  

One question I have been asked: What about all those credit card fees? 

Yes, there is an annual fee for all of the Southwest credit cards.  For our Southwest Business card, we pay an annual fee of $99.  For our personal Southwest Card, we pay an annual fee of $69.  So it costs us $336 ($168 x2) per year to carry these credit cards.  However, my family of six has flown to Orlando, San Diego and Hawaii, and my husband and oldest son (as his companion) have flown to Tampa three separate times to visit our Papaw . . . and we have only paid $11.20/pp each way, in taxes.  The fees pale in comparison to the value that we have already earned by having these cards.

If you are interested in learning more, feel free to reach out to me here.   Or, if I’ve done a great job of explaining all of this, and you’d like to apply for the Southwest Companion Pass, please click here . (This link will allow you to choose from all business and personal Southwest Credit Cards).  I will earn a few points for referring you, but that won’t affect your point accumulation.

Also, here’s a link to the step-by-step process that we followed to see places that I once thought were completely untouchable for an average family of six, like mine! As well, please follow along on my social media channels, on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.  I’m ALWAYS available if you have questions.