Goodbye Best Credit Card Offer of the Year – But the New Southwest Card Offers Do Have a 75% Smaller Minimum Spending Requirement

No good thing lasts forever…and as of today what might have been the best credit card offer of the year is gone.  All three of the Chase Southwest personal credit cards have updated offers.

Now you can earn a 40,000 Southwest point bonus after spending $1,000 on purchases within the first 3 months of account opening.  If you didn’t pull the trigger on the old offer because of its $4,000 minimum spending requirement, then this new bonus be the right deal for you.

This deal is valid for these cards:

• Southwest Rapid Rewards® Priority Credit Card – Best perks
• Southwest Rapid Rewards® Premier Credit Card
• Southwest Rapid Rewards® Plus Credit Card – Smallest annual fee

Even though this new offer doesn’t come with an automatic Southwest Companion Pass, there is still a path to get 95% of the way there with credit card bonuses, I’ll explain.

Southwest Has Replaced the Best Credit Card Offer of the Year

The previous welcome offer for the Southwest personal cards was a 30,000-point bonus and a Companion Pass after spending $4,000 on purchases within the first 3 months of account opening.  The only catch was that the Companion Pass was only valid until December 31, 2019 – normally a Companion Pass is valid for the until the end of the year you earn it in and the entire next calendar year.

Now that that deal is expired, if you want a Southwest Companion Pass you’ll have to earn it the old fashioned way.  That means you’ll need to earn 110,000 qualifying Southwest points or take 100 qualifying one-way flights in a calendar year.  With the new personal card offers you can earn at least 41,000 points (including the points you earn from the minimum spending), which leaves you 69,000 points short.

Chase will only allow you to have 1 personal Southwest card at a time.  And you aren’t eligible for a Southwest personal card if you earned a sign-up bonus on a Southwest personal card in the previous 24 months.  But if you qualify for a small business card, you can have a Southwest personal card and the Southwest Rapid Rewards® Premier Business Credit Card at the same time.

The Southwest Business card has a 60,000-point sign-up bonus after spending $3,000 in the first 3 months of account opening.  So you’d earn 63,000 Southwest points in total, and if you earn the bonus on a personal card in the same year you would only be a mere 6,000 Southwest points short of earning a Companion Pass!

You could earn those points by spending on your Southwest card, flying with Southwest, or bunches of other ways.  Check out this post for more ways to earn points that count toward earning a Companion Pass.

Keep in mind that Chase won’t approved you for one of their credit cards if you’ve opened 5 or more new credit cards from any bank in the past 24 months.  Although Chase small business cards, and small business cards from select other banks, won’t add to that count because they don’t show up on your personal credit report.