Southwest Award Sale: Save 20% When Booking Through 17 September

Southwest airplane on a runway

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Southwest Airlines is blocking middle seats through the end of October and has been selling some nicely discounted fares for at least a couple of weeks, and now the airline is targeting Rapid Rewards members for savings with an offer of 20% off award bookings made by 17 September (Tomorrow).

Key Terms

  • Use code SAVE20NOW
  • Book through 17 September 2020
  • Travel through 31 October 2020
  • All fares are discounted

Thoughts

Southwest’s Rapid Rewards program is a program that’s hard to use to get outsized value because the cost of an award seat is directly related to the cash fare – when the cash fare goes up so does the cost of an award (and vice versa) – so, generally speaking, a Rapid Rewards member will usually find themselves paying 78 points for every dollar of airfare they save every time they book (outside of special sales). Translated into value/per point, this gives Rapid Rewards Points a value of ~1.3 cents each.

This sale, however, is a great opportunity to do a lot better than that. All cabins are being discounted for award travel but the cash fares are remaining set so the value per point shoots up. Here, for example, are a set of cash fares for travel between LAX and Dallas for travel during the promotion period…

a screenshot of a screen

…and here are the corresponding prices for award bookings on the same flights:

a screenshot of a screen

A quick bit of math will show you that the original award pricing for the top two fares shows points being used at ~1.31 cents each (across all fares), while the corresponding award pricing for the promotion period shows points being used at ~1.64 cents each. That’s a very good deal.

What’s an even better deal is the third fare on the list above as courtesy of the super-low pricing that Southwest is offering on select routes (this being one of them), a Rapid Rewards member can get an impressive 2.12 cents of value out of each Rapid Rewards Point used…and it doesn’t get much better than that.

These extra low fares combined with this sale are a good illustration of the value that can be achieved from the Southwest credit card welcome bonuses which, at the time of writing, offer enough points to fly between Los Angeles and Dallas 18 times.

Bottom Line

Southwest is running a very nice promotion right now in which it’s offering a 20% discount on all award bookings made for travel through the end of October. Unfortunately, this sale isn’t going to be around for long as all bookings need to be made by the end of September 17th (tomorrow) so it’s time to get booking if you want to make the most of this deal.