Southwest Airlines Rapid Rewards points

As I start to get this blog off the ground, I am attempting to mix up the posts between some that are introductory along the lines of “what are we even talking about” (like The Basics), as well as some that give information about the different hotel and airline programs that are out there (like La Quinta), especially those that are useful for those of us with families.

One of the things that I did upon starting this blog is to brainstorm a list of possible points.  This is a topic that I have studied pretty in-depth for over a year, so I had a lot of ideas of what might make good posts.  As I started to organize the jumbled incoherent ramblings that I had brainstormed, an article on Southwest Airlines Rapid Rewards program made sense as an early article.  Then I was commenting on a previous article with my sister on Facebook (follow Points with a Crew on FB if you haven’t already!!!) and one of her friends commented that she needed cheap travel from Sacramento to a conference in Las Vegas in March.

Excellent!  You guys are practically writing the blog posts for me!!!!! 😀

My very first thought when I read that was Southwest.  Southwest is PERFECT for this scenario.  First, let’s look at where Southwest flies from Sacramento

Perfect – SMF-LAS non-stop – just what we need.  Let’s head over to southwest.com and see what they get.  I didn’t get exact dates for the aforementioned conference, but we can get an idea

Okay on Southwest’s website, I picked a roundtrip from SMF-LAS, picked some arbitrary dates in March and selected “Show fares in Points”.  Then a click to the Low Fare calendar (though if your dates aren’t flexible that’s not as useful).  So it looks like it will take about 10,000 points for this roundtrip flight

Oh and $5.  Don’t forget the $5 😀

So how do you get 10,000 Southwest Rapid Rewards points?  Actually, it’s pretty easy.  If you’ll remember from our post The Basics in the Beginner’s Guide, one of the active credit card offers is to receive 50,000 Southwest points after spending $2,000 in the first 3 months of having the card

That does come with a $99 annual fee, so it’s not that great if you were just using it to make this one roundtrip flight to Las Vegas.  After all, you could buy the ticket for $200.  But the awesome part about it is that YOU STILL HAVE 40,000 POINTS LEFT!!  So you can make this flight again (and again, and again, and again).

Now, I hope that it goes without saying, but as we learned in How do Credit Card signups affect your credit? – Part 1, your credit is one of your most important assets, and you should not sign up for a credit card just because some guy on the Internet told you to do so.  However, this IS the Internet after all, and I suppose not much goes without saying.  So allow me to repeat myself: DO NOT SIGN UP FOR A CREDIT CARD JUST BECAUSE SOME GUY ON THE INTERNET TOLD YOU TO!

Hopefully that’s clear then 😀 – still, if I had the need to fly from Sacramento to Las Vegas, and I had good credit already, and I understood the mechanics of what I was doing, this is the route that I would probably do.  I actually already did apply for this card back in October, though I still have 3 days to finish up meeting the $2000 spending requirements.

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