How I Earned the Southwest Airlines Companion Pass in 2020
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If you’ve ever lusted after Companion Pass (the perk that lets a friend fly free with you for an entire year or more, depending on when you earn it), the credit cards are a no-brainer. You can take the extreme shortcut and apply for a consumer card and a business card (an admirable feat of commitment), or you can get the Priority card and throw literally all of your spend on it for the year.
For the uninitiated, the Southwest Companion Pass is arguably the best benefit in all of travel rewards: it’s unlimited BOGO for flights. Any time you book a flight, you can add your Companion your free (you just have to pay taxes, which are $5.60 one-way for domestic flights and vary for international travel). As such, it takes a bit of strategy: You have to earn 125,000 Rapid Rewards points in one calendar year (January through December).
Book a $900 one-way from Punta Cana to Denver, as we did recently? You’ll pay the 34,000 points for yourself — but then you can add your Companion and get their ticket free. It basically cuts the cost of your air travel in half, and it’s incredible if you fly Southwest.
The bad news? It’s really difficult to earn that many points by flying a lot.
The good news? It’s relatively easy to do by a little credit card creativity.
Before I go about explaining how *I specifically* earned Companion Pass, it’s worth mentioning that — usually once per year — the Southwest credit card will offer a Companion Pass welcome offer where, if you get approved for the card and meet the minimum spend threshold, you’ll get Companion Pass through the end of the year. That’s probably the easiest way to get Companion Pass if you don’t have the card yet, but it obviously requires waiting for the offer.
The second-easiest way to all but guarantee getting the Companion Pass quickly is simply applying for the personal card (the regular Rapid Rewards credit card) and then applying for the Rapid Rewards business credit card 90 days later. Combining the welcome bonuses should almost always get you Companion Pass.
How I got Companion Pass in 2020, when I wasn’t flying
I earned Companion Pass in likely the strangest year possible: 2020.
It ironically worked in my favor that Southwest was super generous with their rewards last year; at one point halfway through the year, they gave every Rapid Rewards member 25,000 tier-qualifying points as a, “Sorry you can’t fly because of this worldwide pandemic thing,” gift.
I had JUST gotten the Southwest credit card during an 80,000 points welcome bonus period, the highest offer I had seen in a long time. Between my welcome bonus, the points from meeting the spend threshold (I had to spend around $6,000 in 6 months to get all 80,000 points), and the 25,000-point gift, I had:
80,000 points from the welcome bonus
6,000 points from spending to earn the bonus
25,000 points for surviving a pandemic
= 111,000 points
Now, I know what you’re thinking: “Bitch, that sounds too easy. How am I supposed to recreate those conditions?”
But I think the point is almost exactly that: It’s easier than you think. You don’t have to recreate these exact conditions to get the card, but it’s worth timing your application appropriately (more on that below).
From there, I used the Rapid Rewards Shopping Chrome extension to earn points on online shopping. I’m not a crazy online shopper, but every time I’d get the pop-up window with “2x points per dollar” or “3x points per dollar,” I’d use it.
(And it may go without saying, but keep in mind that for the entire time I was trying to earn Companion Pass, I put all my spending on the Rapid Rewards credit card. Even if I were just purchasing regular stuff that earned 1x point per dollar, it still meant adding a few thousand points to my balance every month.
The only notable exception here is rent. Most apartment complexes charge a fee of 3% or $50 to pay rent with a credit card; while this can be worth it to get the initial sign-up bonus, I wouldn’t recommend putting ongoing spend on a credit card. The 1,000 or so points you’ll earn won’t be valuable enough to offset a $50 fee.
I should also mention that I haven’t yet gotten the Companion Pass for 2022 yet. I’m working on it, but this is more of a, “Here’s how you FIRST get Companion Pass,” strategy. Once I get it a second time, I’ll share those specific tips.
115,000 points later
After several months of attempting to earn Companion Pass (welcome bonus + points earned from spending to get the bonus + the 25,000 bonus gesture of goodwill from Southwest for all Rapid Rewards members), I had about 115,000 points. Only 10,000 to go.
By this time, it was October, so I was getting desperate, as I knew I had to earn the rest of my points before my December statement closed.
I did what any good person who uses social media would do — I took to the internet and posted about the card to get the remaining 10,000 points in a referral bonus.
If I hadn’t had any success doing that, I would’ve simply referred Thomas (my husband, and eventual Companion Pass beneficiary) and blackmailed him with the carrot of Companion Pass to get him to apply.
The cool thing about Rapid Rewards is that you can transfer your points to another member, so theoretically I could’ve referred him (to get the remaining 10,000 points I needed), then had him transfer his welcome bonus of 65,000 or 80,000 points to me to double the value (as we could buy two-for-one flights with those points).
This is an easy, built-in referral, as the person who will ultimately benefit from your Companion Pass is incentivized to apply for the card as well to earn their eventual BOGO flights. While I got the Southwest Rapid Rewards Priority card for the ongoing benefits ($149 annual fee), you can refer your Companion to the Plus card if they’re not into the $100+ annual fees, which only has a $69 annual fee. Nice.
Other things worth mentioning
As I said before, the most “I’m lazy and I just want Companion Pass” approach involves simply combining a personal card with a business card. The only difficulty there is meeting two spend bonuses; you’d want to make sure you have the time (and spend capacity) to do so.
Knowing how Companion Pass works is important, too — you get it for the entire rest of the year in which you earn it, as well as the entire following year. This means that — if you somehow earn it in January — you get it for the rest of the current year and entire following year, getting nearly 24 months of Companion Pass.
In practice, the way you’d finagle this is getting a high-welcome bonus card offer (e.g., if the 80,000 bonus were launched in Q4 of the year), then wait to hit the spend threshold until January – that way, you’re doing most of the spending in the previous year, but hitting the threshold that triggers the bonus early in the following year.
For example, applying and getting approved for the card in late October (if it has 65,000 points or more as a welcome bonus) then spending almost enough to trigger the welcome bonus through the end of the year, then spending the rest in January, would trigger the points windfall to happen in the very beginning of the year. If you can complete the mission in Q1, that gives you the entire rest of the year (and the following) with Companion Pass.
Other resources
And since we’re all about transparency here, this content was not commissioned or sponsored by a bank, but for some of the cards above where noted, I may receive compensation if you use my affiliate link to apply. Know that these are all my opinions and experiences described, and no bank, hotel, airline, etc. has approved or endorsed anything you see here – raw MWK hot takes, baby.
