TravelingForMiles.com may receive commission from card issuers. Some or all of the card offers that appear on TravelingForMiles.com are from advertisers and may impact how and where card products appear on the site. TravelingForMiles.com does not include all card companies or all available card offers.
Other links to products and travel providers on this website will earn Traveling For Miles a commission that helps contribute to the running of the site. Opinions, reviews, analyses & recommendations are the author’s alone and have not been reviewed, endorsed, or approved by any of these entities. Terms apply to all credit card welcome offers, earning rates and benefits and some credit card benefits will require enrollment. For more details please see the disclosures found at the bottom of every page.
It was only a few days ago that Southwest launched a generous set of promotions designed to make it a lot easier for flyers to earn/retain A-List and A-List preferred status. Now the airline is back with another new promotion and this time it’s for the very top prize – a Southwest Companion Pass.
The promotion
It’s simple. To earn and then enjoy a Companion Pass that’s valid for travel between 6 January and 6 March 2025, this is what you need to do:
- Register now (here)
- Purchase one round trip or two one-way flights by 5 September 2024 (tomorrow)
- Travel by 20 November 2024
That’s it!
Key terms
- Registration is mandatory.
- Flights booked before registration are not valid for this promotion.
- Once you qualify for promotional Companion Pass, you’ll get an email within 10 days. This email lets you know you qualified and includes information on next steps and how to designate and utilize the promotional Companion Pass.
- You will be able to designate a Companion after the promotional Companion Pass is awarded to your account (6 January 2025).
- You may change your designated Companion up to three times during the promotional Companion Pass period.
- Member’s qualifying flight must be booked through Southwest.com or swabiz.com during the Promotion Period for travel that must be completed during the Travel Period.
- Member’s Rapid Rewards account number must be entered at the time of booking
- A qualifying one-way flight for this promotion is a one-way revenue flight on Southwest Airlines from an origin city to a destination city, including any intermediate stops and/or connections on Southwest Airlines.
- A qualifying round trip flight for this promotion is a round trip revenue flight on Southwest Airlines from an origin city to a destination city and back to the originating airport or carrier-recognized co-terminal.
- Reward travel and Cash + Points bookings qualify for this promotional offer.
- Companion Pass, charter flights, reward and group travel, and Southwest Vacations® packages do not qualify as one-way or round trip revenue flights for this promotion.
- The promotional Companion Pass is valid from January 6, 2025 through March 6, 2025 and allows you to designate one person to fly with you, free of airline charges (does not include taxes and fees from $5.60 one-way) on flights purchased by you, booked through Southwest, and completed between January 6, 2025 and March 6, 2025.
- No Rapid Rewards points nor tier or Companion Pass qualifying points will be awarded for flights taken by the Companion when flying on a promotional Companion Pass or Companion Pass reservation.
Full terms and conditions (which you should read carefully) can be found on the promotion page.
The Southwest Companion Pass
The Southwest Companion Pass is a benefit that usually requires a flyer to earn 135,000 qualifying points or to fly 100 one-way flights, so straight away, you can see how hard it is to earn one of these ‘the hard way’.
But what is a ‘Companion Pass’?
Southwest grants Companion Pass holders the right to choose one person to fly with them for just the cost of the flight taxes (starting at $5.60 for one-way travel). There’s no fare to pay or points to hand over. This second flyer flies for the cost of the taxes alone.
There are no blackout dates on which the Companion Pass cannot be used, and there’s no need for any kind of special fare to be available for the Companion Pass to be useable, so this is a genuinely great and easy to use benefit to have.
On a single trip, a Companion Pass can save a couple hundreds of dollars, but this isn’t a one-time thing. It can be used over and over again for as long as the pass is valid*, so for frequent flyers, the savings that a Companion Pass offers could easily reach into triple figures.
The one key condition to note is that the holder must nominate one person to be their ‘companion’ when they travel, but as Southwest now allows Companion Pass holders to change their designated companion up to three times each calendar year, that’s not going to be a particularly onerous condition for most people.
Booking companion travel is straightforward:
- The holder of the Companion Pass books their ticket.
- After booking their flight, they can head over to the ‘My Trips section’ of their Southwest account and click the ’Add Companion link’ which they’ll find next to the booking they just made.
- From there, the Southwest website will guide them through the purchase process (paying the taxes due) and will ask them to confirm their companion’s details.
That’s it. It’s as simple as that, and for a limited time you don’t have to earn 135,000 qualifying points or fly 100 one-way flights to enjoy this fantastic benefit.
You can enjoy it by simply registering, booking one round trip or two one-way flights by 5 September 2024 (tomorrow) and traveling by 20 November 2024.
*Usually, a Companion Pass is valid for the year in which its earned and a further full 12 months after that, but the Companion Pass that can be earned through the credit card welcome offer is only valid between 6 January and 6 March 2025.
Quick thoughts
It’s hard to imagine an easier way to earn a Southwest Companion Pass (albeit one that’s only valid for 2 months) especially as the terms and conditions indicate that points bookings and points + cash booking as well as regular bookings will qualify for this promotion.
Clearly, the fact that bookings must be made by 23:59 CT tomorrow means that there isn’t really much time for procrastination, but if you don’t already need to make a booking with Southwest, it shouldn’t be too tricky to organise a quick (and cheap) trip that fulfills the terms of the promotion (assuming that you’ll be able to get a lot of use out of the Companion Pass).
Personally, I’d go for this offer if we had plans to visit somewhere expensive (like Hawaii) in the months for which the Companion Pass is valid, as the cost of a day return between LAX and Las Vegas (which would trigger the Companion Pass) …
… would quickly be quickly recouped when Joanna flew to Hawaii for free.
Yes, I would have to work out if (in this example) the saving of ~$217 was worth taking a day out of my life to go to Vegas and back, but as I could work at LAX, onboard the flight, and in Las Vegas, I would probably have fewer obstacles to doing this than some.
Bottom line
For a very limited time (until tomorrow), Southwest is offering everyone the opportunity to earn a promotional Companion Pass (valid for travel between 6 January and 6 March 2024) just by booking and flying two one-way flights or one roundtrip.
If you think that you’ll be able to make good use of the Companion Pass, this is a promotion you should probably jump at as its requirements should be relatively easy to complete.
