For regular travelers of Southwest Airlines, there’s not much exciting about the Rapid Rewards loyalty program. The amount of points you earn depends on the price of your ticket and points are worth a set value range when redeeming for award flights. While there’s some disagreement with the value of a Southwest point, most websites say they’re worth between 1.2 to 1.5 cents.
The downside of a fixed value point system is that you’re not about to use your points for a blockbuster redemption. However, it’s not all bad since you’re always sure what your points will be worth when you want to use them.
When it comes to Southwest, another advantage of points having a fixed value is that when the airline has a fare sale, the amount of points needed for a flight also goes down. Since you can rebook a Southwest flight at a lower price and receive a refund of the point difference, it pays to check your flights whenever there’s a sale.
That’s what makes the current Southwest flash sale different than the rest. From 10/18 – 10/20 for travel through 12/15, you can save 20% off the points needed by using the code SAVE20NOW. Thanksgiving travel on 11/18-23 and 11/26-29 are excluded from the offer. You’ll only get a discount when booking with Rapid Rewards points.
Southwest could have run a 20% off fare sale, which also would have reduced award prices by 20%. Instead, they offered the discount only if you’re booking with points.
I can’t remember other Southwest sales exclusive to award bookings, but I may be wrong. It could be that Southwest wants to reward people in its loyalty program, or maybe there are too many points on the books and Southwest wants people to stop hoarding them.
I don’t have any Southwest flights to book between now and the end of the year but if you have award travel booked or are looking at a trip, now’s the time to book or rebook those flights. FWIW, when trying to use these discount codes for existing bookings in the past, I’ve had to cancel my existing flight and book a new one instead of changing my flight for a discount, which could be a problem if you’ve prepaid for EarlyBird.
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