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This morning I received an email from Southwest Airlines titled “Congrats. You Earned Companion Pass!”
I’ve written about the Southwest companion pass several times on this blog, however, the reason that I was intrigued by the title was because I already have the companion pass.
In fact, I’ve had it since January of 2019 and it’s due to expire at the end of December 2020. So why were they sending me a notification that I have earned it in the middle of the year?
SOUTHWEST COMPANION PASS RECAP
If you’re unfamiliar with the SWA companion pass and why I have it, here’s a simple recap…you need 125,000 SWA points or 100 one-way flights in a calendar year to earn it.
There is no way that I’m flying 100 individual flights on SWA so I, simply, applied for 2 SWA credit cards (a personal and a business credit card), met the minimum spend, obtained more than 125,000 points total from the individual welcome bonuses on each card, and acquired the companion pass.
The reason that I chose to obtain the companion pass at the beginning of 2019 was because my daughter was only a few months old (thus she flies for free until she turns 2), and my wife was my selected “companion,” so she flies for free also. In other words, anytime we flew as a family on Southwest, we were flying 3 for the price of 1.
You can read more about it HERE.
SWA UPDATES MEMBER PROFILES
I quickly logged into my account to make sure everything was ok and noticed that Southwest had changed a few things on my profile.
Specifically, Southwest had extended my companion pass by 6 months. It was originally expiring 31 December 2020 and now it expires 30 June 2021 (as seen below).
Additionally, the airline added qualifying points – these are not the same as redeemable miles – that bring me closer to qualifying for status. As you can see, I was given 15,000 points toward A-list status despite having not flown a single flight with Southwest in 2020 up to this point.
FINAL STAMP
It’s great to see that Southwest has been proactive in updating profiles.
Unfortunately, my daughter will be turning 2 years old before “normalcy” returns so I won’t be able to take my 3-for-1 strategy to the extreme before she’s no longer free.
However, given that I had more than 125,000 points in my account from obtaining the increased welcome bonuses on the credit cards and have redeemed points for every SWA flight since obtaining the pass, I don’t believe that I’ve paid for a SWA flight in the last 2 years so that’s been amazing.
And it doesn’t hurt that I have an additional 6 months to extract a bit more value with my wife still listed as my companion.
Have you seen these updates on your profile? Does anyone else have the Southwest companion pass?
1TattedPassport 