Description: This article is going to show you how to get the Southwest companion pass which will provide free flights for two people by opening two credit cards.
I will show you how to get the Southwest companion pass, this is definitely one of the biggest best-kept secret in the traveling world.
First let me explain to you what the Southwest companion Pass is. The Southwest companion pass allows you to designate one person as your companion and that person gets to travel with you for free whenever you fly on Southwest. Now this companion pass is a perk which is only given to those who fly very frequently on Southwest.
The Southwest companion pass requires you to fly 110,000 points in a 1-year period or a hundred one-way flights in a 1-year period to get the pass. They require a lot of flying because this is a free ticket for your companion, but here’s the secret to getting it for free, the way to do it is to get credit cards.
Having a lot of credit cards doesn’t lower your credit score, it actually increases your score, when I signed up for the credit cards, my credit score was around 700, but after getting these credit cards, it increased to around 800.
So the secret is to sign up for two credit cards that Southwest offer. They offer four different Southwest credit card, the first one has two types of cards, personal and business card, and the personal card is divided in to two types, Southwest personal premier credit card and the Southwest personal Plus credit card, then the business card is almost the same except they are business version. So there is a total of four credit cards.
You only to apply for two of the credit cards, usually, you only need to apply for the two personal cards, the Southwest premier and the Southwest Plus card. The Southwest credit card gives you a bonus of 25,000 points, but you can’t get the Southwest companion Pass with these points, the secret is that you have to wait until they offer 50,000 points.
Southwest personal premier card will offer you 50,000 points when you sign up, so will the Southwest personal plus card, together you get 100,000 points. Now in order to get the Southwest companion pass, you 110,000 points which means you need to do a minimum spend.
A minimum spend is when you sign up for the credit card, you have to spend a certain amount in the first three months, each of the card will require you to spend $2,000 within the first three month which means you have to spend $4,000 in total within the first three months, however you can ask your family member or anybody else to help you meet this minimum spend.
So when you apply for two credit cards, you will get 50,000 points for each card, the after you spend $2,000, they will give you another 2,000 points, then you will get 104,000 points and now you are short of 6,000 points, which means you have to spend $6,000 within the whole calendar year after signing up for the card. Once you’ve hit that $6,000, you will now have a total of 110,000 point and that’s when you get the Southwest companion pass.
The companion pass will be valid for the year and next year since you obtain it in. So as you can see the best time to get the companion pass is the beginning of the year. The drawback of this are, first of all, in order to get the this deal, you have to remember to sign up for both credit card at the same time, getting one card will not earn you enough points.
Second of all, there will be time when Chase and Southwest won’t offer you 50,000 points. As you can see, the premier card is offering 50,000 points but the plus card is not, it only has 25,000 point promotion. So now you cannot get the companion pass deal. But there’s another way to do it.
As we have mentioned, there are also business cards, so you can see here, this business card is offering 50,000 points, which means that you can get the companion pass if you sign up for one personal premier card and one business premier card. But applying for business card is much more harder, so I suggest you apply for two personal cards.
Note that each card does have an annual fee, the annual fee for the premier card is $99 per year, the plus is $69 per year. For example, you get 110 thousand points which equate to about five round-trip tickets from Washington DC to California depending on how many points the flight is, but basically the cheaper the flight is, the less points you have to use to book that flight and the more flights you can take.
For example, going to California takes about 20,000 to 25,000 points round trip per person but with the companion pass, your companion gets to go with you for free, so therefore the total number of points you need to redeem for that flight is about 20,000 to 25,000 points. So you can get about four or five round-trip flight to California.
But make sure that before you sign up for the credit card, you go to Southwest com and make sure that you enroll up on the upper right for a rapid reward account, this is very important because when you sign up for the actual credit card, you need to put in that same rapid reward number for both of the cards that you are signing up for to make sure that the points go to the same account.
If you sign up and you forget this step that means they will create another number for each of the credit card for the points to go to and therefore you will not be able to get the the Southwest companion pass, so keep in mind that you have to sign up for two cards at the same time, if you have any questions, feel free to reach out to us before you sign up.
Like I said earlier, right now the promotion is only 50,000 points for premier and 25,000 points for the plus card, you’re going to wait until both cards have a 50,000 point promotion, you can search for that by googling each of the card’s name and seeing what promotion pops up.