Southwest Referral Question

[Anonymous]

I'm wondering if the Referral that gives the person referring 10k points also gives the person being referred the highest points available.

For example: the normal offer is 40k points for signing up, but what if the publicly available offer is 60k points, is that able to be combined with being referred by a friend? Then 70k points are being given for you signing up.

[K-in-Boston]

Depending on the referral offer, it's not uncommon for the person signing up to get a slightly lower bonus than those that may be otherwise publicly available or targeted to them at any time.  However, the opposite can also be true (particularly with other lenders such as Amex), where a referral may be substantially better for the person applying. As for combining, no.  The app must be done through the referral link, and whatever that offer is, is the one they get.

[Anonymous]

The referral offer doesn’t always match available public offers. And all available public offers don’t always match either.

It’s possible the person applying can contact a Rapid Rewards CSR to attempt to have the highest publicly available offer matched. Ultimately, this would be up to the CSR’s discretion and the minimum spend would still need to be met.

Last summer, I applied for a 40K point bonus offer. Two weeks later, a 60K point bonus offer became available with $1K extra dollars of spend. I’d already met the spend on the higher point offer and reached out to Chase to see if they’d match. Chase referred me to a Rapid Rewards Customer Service. I sent a secure message asking them to match and indicating I’d already met the spend. They called for clarification. It was also escalated to someone. They eventually matched the higher signup bonus. Note, all of this occurred prior to my first billing statement posting and I met the minimum spend for both offers.

This isn’t exactly what you asked for but it does show the Rapid Rewards folks are generally easy to deal with. My application was independent of a referral offer. It’s possible they do it this way because part of the sign up bonus goes to the person referring and part of it goes to the applicant (collectively adding up to 50K-60K points) as the cost for these offers is substantial.

YMMV.

Good luck.

P.S. I’m not sure if this type of info should be sent in a public message rather than a PM. I don’t want to be the cause of SWRRs declining to honor higher bonus offers. Google finds everything...If you guys think I should edit this, let me know.

[Anonymous]

Thank you for the information. I know that Chase (and their co-branded partners) generally will match sign up bonuses within a month of signing up (or so I've read).

Looking at Chase/Southwest's current referral offer it seems to match the publicly available offer (but also gives the person referring 10k points).

"Share the LUV®.

Each friend will receive an offer for 50,000 bonus points after they spend $2,000 on purchases in the first 3 months from account opening."