Is Southwest’s New Credit Card Companion Pass Offer Too Good to Be True?
Photo Credit: Southwest Airlines will begin flying to Hawaii later this year, in part because it hopes to boost sign-ups for its co-branded credit card. Pictured is a Boeing 737 on the ground in Honolulu. Southwest Airlines
Skift Take
New customers who apply for the Southwest credit card by Monday, February 11, and meet minimum spending requirements will earn one of the airline's companion passes for the rest of the year. The deal sounds too good to be true. But Southwest knows what it's doing. This is probably smart business.
Before Mark Goshgarian, a consultant, applied for the Southwest Airlines credit card more than a year ago, he calculated how much value he could extract from it, sketching his 2018 travel plans, month by month.
He had good reason. Once approved, he would earn a Southwest companion pass, allowing him to bring another person on each trip for free. It's a perk Southwest usually reserves for its most lucrative frequent flyers, many of whom spend $10,000 or more per year on high-priced tickets. But in late 2017, Southwest, locked in a skirmish with Alaska Airlines over which would be California's preferred short-haul airline, offered it to any state resident who signed up for its credit card and made one purchase.
"We liked to travel a lot and we saw it as, 'shoot, now we can get a crazy good deal,"' said Goshgarian, 35, who used it about eight times from John Wayne Airport in Orange County, California, usually with his girlfriend. He estimates they saved as much as $2,400 flying to
