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canyonwalkerOn Friday afternoon I saw an alert on a frequent flyer BBS I monitor. Costco was selling Southwest Airlines gift cards (GCs) for 10% below face value. I clicked through the link and found the sale page: a $500 value gift card for $449.99.
The amount gave me pause. Even though I travel on Southwest regularly, $450 is a fair bit of money to tie up in a GC usable only with them. As a point of comparison I did buy $2k of GCs for Marriott years ago, though I got those at a 20% discount. I considered 20% a fair spread for tying up cash in a much less flexible GC. Was 10% enough of a discount to make this GC worth it? I pinged Hawk for her opinion. I thought she might object but instead she responded, "Maybe buy two." 😂
Part of my thought process with buying any GC is, "What's my plan for spending it?" With airline and hotel GCs specifically that's, "Okay, what travel am I already planning where I can redeem these?" So before clicking "BUY" on those Southwest GCs I mentally added up the cost of flights I've already purchased for the next few months. It turns I'm already sitting on $2,000 of tickets! 😳
Those existing tickets are all refundable. I can refund them to the credit cards I used to purchase them and then rebuy them with the GCs. Doing that would use up 4 x $500 GCs. Thus if I bought six, I figured, I could rebook all my existing flights and still have about $1,000 of GCs left for travel I'm sure I'll book before mid 2022.
So that's how (and why) I spent $2,700 on airline gift cards Friday.
The amount gave me pause. Even though I travel on Southwest regularly, $450 is a fair bit of money to tie up in a GC usable only with them. As a point of comparison I did buy $2k of GCs for Marriott years ago, though I got those at a 20% discount. I considered 20% a fair spread for tying up cash in a much less flexible GC. Was 10% enough of a discount to make this GC worth it? I pinged Hawk for her opinion. I thought she might object but instead she responded, "Maybe buy two." 😂
Part of my thought process with buying any GC is, "What's my plan for spending it?" With airline and hotel GCs specifically that's, "Okay, what travel am I already planning where I can redeem these?" So before clicking "BUY" on those Southwest GCs I mentally added up the cost of flights I've already purchased for the next few months. It turns I'm already sitting on $2,000 of tickets! 😳 Those existing tickets are all refundable. I can refund them to the credit cards I used to purchase them and then rebuy them with the GCs. Doing that would use up 4 x $500 GCs. Thus if I bought six, I figured, I could rebook all my existing flights and still have about $1,000 of GCs left for travel I'm sure I'll book before mid 2022.
So that's how (and why) I spent $2,700 on airline gift cards Friday.
