It's not a "bad" deal, especially if you already have points in your account. The best thing about booking with points is that your ticket basically becomes 100% refundable. If the price drops, you simply "change" your flight and the difference in points is refunded to your account. If you need to cancel, you get your points back.
I'm in a pickle right now because I am planning on traveling with my DD's in October. We are limited to when we can depart (must be after 5 pm on a Friday or before noon on Saturday) so I am hesitant to commit to SWA until they release their itinerary. Right now, I know that there are flights on Delta and American that will fit our needs, but I'd prefer to fly on SWA since they are typically cheaper. For our trip home, we can fly home Friday late afternoon or evening, or any time on Saturday. So I could lock us in to a return flight on SWA because we are super-flexible with our trip home. I have about 10K points available now and for (3) R/T tickets, I would need about 60K (max...that would be about $375 r/t each) so to buy another 50K worth of points, with the special, I would buy 35K which would get me 49K. That would cost me $962.50, which would "save" me about $150. It only "saves" me money because I already have 10K points available, BUT it makes those tickets refundable. On top of that, I have a trip planned for October 2019 so if the price goes down, I can always save the points and use them towards my trip next year. Unfortunately, since we are really limited on our departure choices, I cannot lock us in to SWA until they release their itinerary. So the best I can do right now is buy enough points to cover the flight home. I may just buy 20K worth of points so that I can cover our return flight. That way, I still have enough in my cash budget to cover the cost of our tickets if we have to fly on a different airline.
