Southwest is coming on pretty strong... and I like it

Good morning, and welcome back to Daily Drop, the one-stop shop for all your miles and points needs. It’s like Costco, but we don’t make you pay to become a member of our club. 😉

Here’s what we have in stock for you today:

• ✈️ Southwest drops another (better) promotion

• 💳 30% transfer bonus to Avios

• 🤓 Travel Trivia Tuesday

✈️ Southwest drops another (better) promotion

Southwest has one of the best deals in the biz: the Companion Pass. This tool lets you bring a companion with you on every flight you take for a full year, and all they have to pay is the $5.60 in taxes and fees.

Usually, this pass is hard to earn. But Southwest has been periodically dropping promos to help us get there faster, including this latest one. 👇

The way you earn Companion Pass is by racking up “Companion Pass Qualifying Points” and “Companion Pass Qualifying Flights.”

If you earn 135,000 qualifying points and complete 100 qualifying flights, you’ll be rewarded handsomely with a full year of Companion Pass.

But that’s a lot of flying and a lot of money…

UNTIL NOW!

Between now and November 30th, you’ll earn the following by registering for this offer:

• 2x Companion Pass Qualifying Points for all Southwest flights

• 2x Companion Pass Qualifying Points per dollar spent on Southwest co-branded credit cards

• 1x Companion Pass Qualifying Flights for flights booked with points

So let’s break this down…

Normally, only paid flights count toward qualification. With this promo, both paid and award flights count, which is awesome.

So, theoretically, you could book this ticket from SFO to LAX for only 2,300 Southwest points and get THREE qualifying flights toward Companion Pass during the promotion period since there are two layovers.

Points earned from spending on Southwest co-branded credit cards always count toward earning Companion Pass, but now you’ll earn twice as many.

Oh, and did I mention that signup bonuses on SW co-branded cards count toward qualification as well? That means if you were to earn 50,000 points from a signup bonus on a Southwest co-branded credit card, you’d already be close to halfway to earning Companion Pass.

So if you can get in on a good signup bonus and spend a decent amount of money on the card, it could really fast-track you to Companion Pass, along with the 2x points earned from all other paid flights.

Even with these accelerators, earning the Companion Pass is tough and takes a lot of flying on Southwest or a lot of money spent on credit cards.

Still, if you fly Southwest a lot or you’re getting fairly close to earning a Companion Pass, this promo could be a GREAT way to get across the finish line.

Don’t forget to go into your Southwest account and register for the offer before November 30th.

💳 30% transfer bonus to Avios

Another day, another tasty transfer bonus.

This time, you’ll earn an extra 30% bonus when transferring points from this bank to any of the Avios programs (British Airways, Aer Lingus, Iberia).

Avios is one of our favorite points programs here at Daily Drop, because of the great value you get for your points and the flexibility of the program.

One of the unique things about Avios is that you can freely transfer them between the programs that use Avios as a currency.

For example, if you have 45,000 British Airways Avios, you can transfer them into your Qatar Airways loyalty account.

Personally, I tend to use my Avios with Qatar most often. Given the amount of long-haul international travel I do, I find Qatar to be a great stopover between points A and B.

For example, last year I used Qatar Avios to book a flight from Warsaw to New Delhi for just 17,500 points one-way, and then used another 15,000 Avios to upgrade myself to business class, which was amazing.

If you don’t do a lot of long-haul or international travel, that’s okay because Avios can be used to book flights on American Airlines, both domestic in the U.S. and internationally.

For example, you could use British Airways to book a flight from New York City to Miami on American Airlines for just 9,000 Avios one-way and $5.60 in taxes.

So here’s the bottom line:

Whether you travel abroad or need to book short hops around the U.S., Avios is an awesome program, so consider taking advantage of this 30% transfer bonus from this bank.

🤓 Travel Trivia Tuesday

Correct answer: Uzbekistan and Liechtenstein.

We all know what being landlocked means (the country is surrounded on all sides by other countries).

But being “double-landlocked” means that all of the countries bordering a given country are landlocked, so you’d need to go through at least TWO other countries to get to the ocean.

In the case of Liechtenstein, both bordering countries (Austria and Switzerland) are landlocked.

Uzbekistan, on the other hand, is bordered by FIVE entire countries, all of which are also landlocked…

It’s pretty cool that out of the nearly 200 countries in the world, only two of them fall into this category.

The world is pretty neat, eh? 🌎

Did you know that Daily Drop has a YouTube channel? Check out our latest video for some visual travel hacking tips 👇

That’ll do for another tasty travel-hacking Tuesday! I hope you’ll be able to take advantage of maybe one (or both!) of these cool promos and bonuses going on right now.

See you tomorrow for your regularly scheduled mid-week pick-me-up ❤️

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