If your family fly often within US domestic, Chase Southwest Premier Card would be a great addition to your card portfolio. Chase currently offers 50,000 bonus points for $2,000 spend within the first 3 months, with $99 annual fee.
We use United miles for international flights, and Southwest Airlines points for US domestic flights. Southwest Airline has been expanding to cover Cancun. If Southwest can land a deal to fly to Hawaii, then Southwest points would become much more valuable.
Specials about Southwest Rapid Reward Program:
- Using points to redeem Southwest flight ticket saves about 35% average. For example, a $100 flight ticket can be redeemed by 6,500 points
- Flight tickets can be cancelled one day ahead with full refund back to your account.
- Ticket prices can vary on any day, depending on the flight hours.
- Rapid Reward Program is a partner of Chase UR points transfer partners.
- Rapid Reward online system is easy to book, modify or cancel a flight reservation, and points can be refunded back into your account within a few minutes
Assume you earn the 50,000 Southwest points, how to save even more?
- Reserve your flight ticket (as well as for others) each way using your Rapid Reward points. For example, a round-trip flight can be reserved as two separate flights, so Southwest system will designate two ticket confirmation numbers for your round trip. (One way trip fee is half of a two-way trip fee.)
- Probably due to non-peak reservation time, I noticed that Southwest flight prices are cheapest during Tuesday and Wednesday nights.
- Once in a while, Southwest offers promotion with limitations, typically for non-peak travel times. like the following promotion
- Conduct a quick test of the flight price to see if there is a significant drop of price. My trigger point is minimum 2,000 points per flight. If flight ticket is reserved as a round-trip, then the entire ticket would need to be cancelled. Sometimes, there is only price-drop in either way. Therefore, reserving a flight ticket each way creates two reservation numbers which allows cancellation of one way while keeping the other. Several months ago, I reserved four one-way return flight ticket from Las Vegas to San Jose for 7,944 points per person. But the promotional price is now only 6,056 points per person for the flight. A quick online cancellation and re-booking allowed us to save almost 8,000 rapid reward points, which equivalents to about $120.
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| Cancel and re-order |
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| Don't forget to apply your previous fee refunds |
I also transferred some UR points to Southwest Rapid Reward account, then redeemed two round-trip Southwest flight tickets for my parents-in-law to fly to New York.
All 50,000 points are used up; we save at least $800.
If you plan to travel US domestic quite often for the next 12 months, this card offering maybe just in time for you.
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