Introduction
Southwest Airlines and Chase ran a Companion Pass-from-welcome-bonus promotion in early 2023 that became a reference point for every similar offer that followed. The promotion paired the Southwest Rapid Rewards Plus, Premier, and Priority personal cards with a Companion Pass valid through February 28, 2024, plus 30,000 Rapid Rewards points after $4,000 of spend in three months. The offer expired on March 13, 2023. We're documenting it now because readers still ask about it, and because the playbook the airline ran in 2023 is the same one Chase rolled out again in early 2026.
What the 2023 Offer Was
Through March 13, 2023, applicants for any of Southwest's three personal Rapid Rewards co-brand cards earned a Companion Pass plus a points bonus once they cleared the welcome-offer spend threshold. The pass was valid through February 28, 2024, regardless of when in the promotional window the cardholder qualified.
The Premier card carried the headline configuration most readers remember: Companion Pass plus 30,000 Rapid Rewards points after $4,000 in spend in the first three months, with a $99 annual fee at the time. The Plus and Priority cards ran parallel terms with different point totals and spend hurdles. Chase's underwriting rules applied as usual, including the 5/24 cap and the one-personal-Southwest-card-at-a-time restriction Southwest co-brands have always carried.
The Companion Pass earned through this promotion behaved identically to one earned the conventional way. A designated companion flew with the cardholder for taxes and fees only, starting at $5.60 each way on domestic itineraries, on both cash and award bookings.
Why It Was Notable
Southwest's standard path to the Companion Pass requires either 135,000 qualifying points or 100 qualifying one-way flights inside a single calendar year. That's a meaningful ask. Most travelers reach it by stacking cash-fare flying, credit-card welcome bonuses, and partner activity over six to nine months of deliberate effort. The 2023 promotion collapsed the timeline to whatever pace the cardholder needed to clear $4,000 in spend, and handed the pass over the moment the bonus posted.
For a couple flying Southwest two or three times together each year, the math was straightforward. Three round trips at roughly $200 per ticket netted around $1,200 in saved fares for the companion, comfortably more than the Premier card's annual fee for years to come. The 30,000-point sweetener funded another round trip on top of that, depending on routing. Compared to standing welcome bonuses that ran in the 50,000-to-75,000 points-only range during the same window, the 2023 offer was meaningfully more valuable for any household with at least one regular travel companion.
The promotion also landed during a period when Southwest was still rebuilding loyalty after the late-2022 operational meltdown. A Companion Pass-from-welcome-bonus offer was a direct way to bring sidelined travelers back into the network, and Southwest leaned on it accordingly.
How It Compared to Standing Offers
In the months immediately after March 13, 2023, the three Southwest personal cards reverted to points-only welcome bonuses on the order of 50,000 to 75,000 points after a smaller spend. Those were respectable bonuses but not in the same conversation as a Companion Pass. The instant-pass framing only resurfaced when Chase chose to run it again, which it did in early 2024 and in the Chase Southwest Companion Pass promotion of March 2026.
Readers who applied during the 2023 window and hit the spend by, say, May had nine or ten months of paired travel before the pass expired in February 2024. Readers who waited and earned the pass the conventional way through points or qualifying flights would have seen it expire on the same date with significantly less runway. Timing into one of these welcome-bonus promotions has always rewarded early action over late.
The Companion Pass Mechanics, Briefly
This part hasn't changed since 2023. Once issued, the pass lets a designated companion fly with the cardholder on every Southwest flight, paying only the government taxes and fees, on both cash fares and points redemptions. The companion can be changed up to three times per calendar year. Southwest accepts the pass on every Southwest route, full stop. There are no blackout dates. For a complete walkthrough of qualifying methods and the airline's Southwest 2.0 program adjustments, our Companion Pass strategy guide covers the current rules.
What Readers Should Take From This
Two takeaways. First, instant-Companion-Pass promotions are the right time to apply for a Southwest co-brand card if the pass is the reason you're applying. The math always favors the welcome-bonus path over the conventional 135,000-qualifying-points slog. Second, these promotions follow a loose first-quarter cadence. The 2023, 2024, and 2026 windows all opened in January and closed by mid-March, anchored to the heart of travel-planning season.
If you missed the 2023 window and the 2026 window, the practical move is to set inbox alerts for Southwest and Chase email lists and watch the January-through-March window in any given year. Between those promotional periods, the standing welcome bonuses on the Plus, Premier, and Priority cards remain available to readers who want a Southwest card now and don't need the pass to be the lever. For a small-business owner, the Southwest Performance Business sometimes runs on a separate cadence from the personal-card promotions, which doubles the odds of catching one of these offers in any given year.
The 2023 promotion is closed and won't return in its original form. Whatever Chase and Southwest run next will have its own dates, its own spend thresholds, and its own pass expiration. The shape of the deal, though, is the same one we keep seeing.
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