(EXPIRED) Southwest shopping portal promo: Spend $100 or $400 & earn 400 or 2,000 bonus points

Several airline shopping portals have been running a sweepstakes offer for the last week or two. Those promos aren’t very interesting, but a new one from Southwest is because they’re offering up to 4,000 bonus Rapid Rewards points.

The Deal

• The Southwest shopping portal is offering the following new promotion:
  • Spend $100 & get 400 bonus points
  • Spend $400 & get 2,000 bonus points
• Direct link to offer.

Key Terms

• During the “Fall Bonus” offer, which runs from September 12, 2023 at 12:00 a.m. ET through September 18, 2023 at 11:59 p.m. ET (the “Bonus Period”), Rapid Rewards Shopping Member will earn a one-time bonus of up to 2,000 Rapid Rewards bonus points on qualifying purchases, in addition to the standard Rapid Rewards points earned from shopping online through Rapid Rewards Shopping.
• “Qualifying purchases” do not include returns, cancellations, shipping and handling, taxes, gift card, or other cash-equivalent purchases, and certain products that are not eligible for bonus points. Please see the Rapid Rewards Shopping site for details on product eligibility and other restrictions.
• This one-time bonus award will be determined using one of the following tiers, based on Member’s cumulative qualifying purchases made during the Bonus Period: Tier one bonus: Earn 400 Rapid Rewards bonus points for qualifying purchases of $100-$399.99; or Tier two bonus: Earn 2,000 Rapid Rewards bonus points for qualifying purchases of $400 or more. Please allow up to 10 weeks after the Bonus Period for Rapid Rewards bonus points to post to your Rapid Rewards account. The Tier two bonus provides the maximum number of points that will be awarded to an eligible Rapid Rewards account. Void where prohibited by law.
• Bonus points will not count toward A-List, A-List Preferred, or Companion Pass qualification.

Quick Thoughts

This is a pretty strong promotion from the Southwest shopping portal because if you spend exactly $100 or $400 you’ll earn an effectively 4x or 5x bonus Rapid Rewards points on top of the standard earnings through the portal.

I tend to find that the Southwest portal offers poor standard earning rates for retailers, so be sure to compare portal rates using Cashback Monitor because even with the 400 or 2,000 bonus points you might do better clicking through from a different portal.

Something worth remembering is that Giftcards.com returned to airline shopping portals recently. You could buy two $250 virtual Visa gift cards for a total of $511.90 as they come with a $5.95 purchase fee. Portals only earn points based on the card value, so you’d earn 1,000 Rapid Rewards points as standard (due to the current 2x earning rate for Giftcards.com) as well as 2,000 bonus points from this promo. That’s a total of 3,000 bonus points for a cost of $11.90 before any kind of liquidation fees for those gift cards. That’s like buying Rapid Rewards points for 0.4cpp which is a great deal if you can easily make use of the Visa gift cards, plus that doesn’t even take into account your earnings by putting that spend on a credit card. Don’t forget that there’s a Giftcards.com Citi Offer too.

You might notice that there’s an exclusion for gift card purchases in the terms of this portal promo. That’s because most retailers don’t offer cashback/rewards via their affiliate programs for gift card purchases, but Giftcards.com is an exception which has always worked in the past to trigger the spend requirements from these promos.

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