Southwest Companion Pass

Dear Annabelle,

I am home today trying to rest and heal from the surgery; Andrew has the girls at his Mom's.  It seems like it might take a while (6-12 weeks) before all the ligaments and such are feeling well again.  So I have been back to researching credit cards and financial things.

I just stumbled across the Southwest Companion Pass.  It is a pass that you can earn if you acquire 110,000 Southwest miles in a given calendar year.  It then lets you have a companion fly free (well just taxes) with you on whatever flights you take in the next year (and the remainder of the year you earn it).  The neat thing is that it doesn't matter how those flights are booked.  They can be reward tickets, your work can buy them, etc.  Andrew is currently flying a lot of Southwest flights to Mountain View for work and they generally seem the best deal for anything domestic (e.g. going to Orlando).

So how does one earn 110,000 Miles? Well it seems like they have a Premier and a Plus card and back in May they were both offering 50K bonuses with a 2K spend each.  They are currently at 25K bonus each which I don't think would be enough for us but if it goes back up to 50K I think we might be interested in going for it and trying to get the Companion Pass.  The biggest benefit would be to get it early in the year.  If you got it in January 2016 you would have the pass until the end of 2017, almost two full years.

Seems almost too good to be true so we will see if it keeps existing.  There is talk of Southwest flying to Canada by the end of the decade, which means it could be really helpful if it stays around.

I read about this here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Also of note is that Southwest Miles can be a good short haul option with the US (as compared to Avios).

Hugs,
Jen