Explore the US with Southwest’s Destination Finder

Sorry everyone, but it appears that this tool has been removed from the Southwest website! I’ve searched high and low, and can’t find it. If you are looking to maximize your Southwest Rapid Rewards points, here’s a different handy tool to play with!

I’ve recently been getting into the idea of earning airline miles towards travel. Now that I have a basic idea of how to make the system work, I feel good about my point accrual and upcoming possible free (!) trips. Before, I just used sites like Kayak to buy the cheapest ticket regardless of carrier. Now, the more I learn about loyalty programs, the more likely I am to stay brand-loyal when booking flights. Today I want to Southwest’s Destination Finder, a cool tool that I found on Southwest’s website.

The Tool

I’m not sure how I found this tool, I stumbled upon it somewhere in the Southwest.com website when I was bored. The Destination Finder tool is helpful for estimating points needed for reward travel. It lets you choose your origin airport and use a slider to select different point values. It is like casting a net and seeing how far you can get (round-trip) for a certain number of points.

How to Use

First, you will choose your origin location. I chose San Diego, because that’s where I live. This first step would be especially useful for someone who lives halfway between airports: the reward prices and destinations might be different depending on where you depart.

Next, using the slider, you can gradually increase the values and see locations light up as you pass their threshold. Below, you can see the first round of destinations I can reach for the lowest number of points (below 13,000). This is interesting to me because I can easily drive to Las Vegas in six hours, so flying to Salt Lake City or Boise seems like “more travel” for what I’m “spending.”

Another thing to note is which cities in close areas are cheaper. If you look again at the picture above, you’ll notice that San Jose is cheaper than Oakland or San Francisco. Depending on the point difference, it might make sense to fly into San Jose and rent a car to get to San Francisco. Something to keep in mind when planning.

Where have I been? Visit The Voyageer’s USA posts.

When you see a city you’re interested in, you can click it and they will give you an estimated value of points for a round-trip ticket. I chose Wichita because my husband’s family lives out there, and we have lots of college friends in the area.

I recently signed up for the Southwest Chase credit card, and the sign up bonus covered our getaway to Albuquerque with enough points left over for one ticket to Cabo. Together with my Alaska Airlines Visa, I love using my credit cards on daily purchases to help earn free trips down the road.

Booking.com

Summary

I mainly wanted to share this tool because I know that Southwest has loyal fans and their Rapid Rewards program is popular. This section of the website is not easy to find but fun to mess around with while daydreaming destinations. The idea of reward travel can be very uncertain and nebulous; this helps put point values to trips and makes it easy to set goals. Southwest is a great carrier because of their generous bag allowances, friendly staff, and outstanding customer service, so I’m definitely going to put more energy into earning points with them and using that to travel domestically.