Can You Use Southwest Points for Car Rental & Is It Worth It?

Southwest Airlines offers an exceptional, award-winning loyalty program called ‘Rapid Rewards’ to its customers. Moreover, this highly flexible membership allows passengers to earn and redeem points on flight bookings, car rentals, and other merchandise.

Further, the carrier is in alliance with renowned car rental companies such as Hertz, Avis, and Thrifty. Therefore, passengers can enjoy a variety of cost-efficient deals when booking cars with Southwest Airlines.

Hence, to know how worth it is to spend Southwest points for car rentals and other ways to maximise profits. A detailed guide is presented below.

Are Southwest Points worth Redeeming for Car Rentals?

First and foremost, travellers can use their Rapid Rewards Points to rent cars and purchase other commodities. But, according to detailed analysis, this redemption is often not worth it for car rentals.

To explore this, it is important to know the value of 1 Southwest Point and how many such rewards will be required to rent a decent car. Furthermore, a Southwest point is equivalent to $0.012 to $0.014, or 1.2 to 1.4 cents. Whereas the average daily cost of the carrier’s partner car rental companies in the U.S. is $95. So, in this case, a customer is required to spend at least 6,000 to 7,000 Rapid Reward points on a car rental.

This is the reason why passengers on Reddit have mentioned that ‘’Using Southwest points for anything other than SWA flights yields a severely diminished dollar value’’. Hence, using Southwest Points for car rentals is clearly not worth it.

How can I use Southwest Points to Rent a Car?

Alternatively, the flyers who have plenty of Rapid Rewards Points in their wallet. Subsequently, they can surely use them to make reservations with Thrifty, Avis, or other such companies. Thus, grabbing an offer using the points can be an advantageous deal for such customers.

The following are the steps to make reservations using Southwest Points. 

1. Visit the Official Website of 'Southwest Airlines'.
2. Secondly, navigate to the Southwest More Rewards Portal to redeem those pre-earned points.
3. Then, log in to your Rapid Rewards Account.
4. Further, just click on the ‘Rapid Rewards’ section at the top of the page.
5. After that, choose the option of ‘Redeem Points for Car Rentals’.
6. Additionally, after that, the website will redirect you to important particulars. 
7. Enter the Departure and Arrival Location, along with the departing and arriving dates.
8. Furthermore, if the passengers have a car rental deal or offer code, it can also be entered.
9.  Accordingly, a collection of car options will be displayed on the screen.
10. Furthermore, travellers can select their preferred car type among Economy, Compact, Premium, Mid-Size, Full-Size, and Luxury.
11. Southwest’s website also reflects the lowest deals available on the desired route to make the car rental even more economical.
12. Accordingly, travellers can select the car that suits them the most.
13. At last, use the Southwest Points to make the payment, and a confirmation email will be sent to the inbox.

How to Maximise Southwest Points through Car Rentals?

Equally important, passengers can also increase their overall point collection by booking cars with Southwest quite frequently. To be precise, below are the number of points that can be earned by the flyers when renting cabs. 

Other Ways to Rent Affordable Cars with Southwest Airlines?

Above all, for passengers who don’t have enough Rapid Rewards points or are not able to book cars. Thus, they can grab the latest deals and offers and use offer codes to make the car reservation immensely affordable. Here is a glimpse of such budget-friendly options:

Hertz: Customers can earn up to 2,700 Rapid Rewards points for 7 days when booking cars with Hertz. In addition, customers can also enjoy a minimum of 30% discount on the total payment. 

Budget: For Budget cars, passengers can earn an average of 3,000 Rapid Rewards Points and get 30% off on the base fare.

Dollar: With Dollar Car Rental, customers can enjoy up to 1,200 Rapid Rewards Points and save up to 15% on the overall price. 

For more details on airport rentals, travelers can also check out car rental services at major airports to compare better deals and availability.

Conclusion

Therefore, it can be concluded that Southwest Points can be conveniently used to purchase cars. However, doing so is not considered worthwhile most of the time. So, in spite of spending Rapid Rewards, travellers can grab beneficial car rental deals available on Southwest’s websites. Thus, all the essential data regarding this is presented above.