I recently received an offer from Southwest via my Chase Rapid Rewards Priority Visa Card. I received two coupon codes which are good for 20% off the points needed for a flight, round trip or one way. The big catch is that you must travel within 14 days of booking the flight.

Anyone who flies Southwest even a little bit knows that SWA fares tend to increase as you get closer to the departure date. And they increase a LOT within a month of departure. So, this is one of those offers that sounds good but isn’t typically all that usable.

I booked a one way flight from Reno to Detroit on 7/24 for 33,879 RR miles. I checked the last week of June, and the flight was almost 50,000 RR miles. I figured I would not be able to use this offer. But in today’s email was a SWA flight sale notice. I get these regularly. So, I checked online, and my flight had decreased by about 400 RR miles. No big deal. However, I could use my 20% off coupon and now my flight is 7023 RR miles less. Using 1.5 cents per mile, this is $105 savings.

The coupon code I used is CMD2UHFDAK. I don’t know if that code is unique to me or not.

For future flights, if I get a SWA email announcing a fare sale and that email is within 2 weeks of my flight departure, I will check to see if I can save some miles. It is good to periodically check SWA to see if your flight cost has decreased but I typically do this at least one month out. Now, with this coupon offer, checking within 2 weeks could be a money saver, especially if SWA is having a fare sale (a pretty frequent occurrence).

I didn’t see a straightforward way to modify my flight to now include the coupon code. I ended up purchasing the new flight and then cancelling the old flight. A call to SWA may have allowed me to do the flight modification but hold times on SWA have been very long so I just decided to do it online.

One quirk about SWA is you can’t easily book a round trip, multi city flight online easily. You can book a one way flight with a stop in between but I haven’t found a way to make it work for a roundtrip ticket. We are going on a cruise out of Los Angeles in October. Our flight plan is DTW to LAX, then take the cruise, then LAX to LV for 2 days then finally to DTW. With the 5 day gap in the middle, plus the extra stop, I didn’t see a way to do this online. I am going to call SWA and see if it can be done. I’ll report out when I find more information.

As always, if you are interested in sharing a credit card referral, you can email me at [email protected]