Southwest e-miles

[yankebabie]

Anybody sign up for this and if so how does it work?

 

[Tara]

You get points for every ticket you purchase. The number of points depends on the price of the ticket and the fare class. There are 3 fare classes - Wanna Get Away, Anytime, and Business Select. For those classes, you earn different amounts of points for every dollar you spend:

Wanna Get Away - earns 6 points per $1 spent
Anytime - earns 10 points per $1 spent
Business Select - earns 12 points per $1 spent

(Note this is just on the base fare - you don't earn any points on the tax portion. If you fly frequently enough to earn Southwest's A-List or A-List Preferred status, you'll earn even more points per $1.)

A traveler accumulates these points in her account. They can be used at any for award travel as long as you have enough points. You can use points for one portion of a round trip. Every trip requires a different number of points based on the "retail" cost of that trip.

For instance, I just priced a round-trip from Albany to Orlando for the dates of my trip in August. The cheapest itinerary is $400 even with tax. That would cost 21,360 points for one traveler. If I had earned points at the lowest rate of 6 points per $1 spent, I would have had to buy $3,560 in fares (plus tax) to have enough points to pay for that ticket, plus whatever the taxes would have been on those fares...so about $4000 all said and done.

It's a pretty easy to use system - not as easy as it used to be (it was 1 flight=1 point and 16 points=1 round trip award ticket) but still pretty good.