A few weeks ago I booked myself a hotel room at the Grand Hyatt in Washington, DC through the third-party hotel booking site Rocketmiles. I’ll write more about why I booked with Rocketmiles vs. directly through the hotel in another post. And for those unfamiliar with Rocketmiles, it is a hotel booking site where you can earn airline miles instead of hotel points.
With Rocketmiles you have a bunch of airlines to select from (and actually even a few select merchant gift cards), and I selected Southwest. Part of my reason to pick Southwest was a test to see if the points earned counted towards the Southwest Companion Pass. The number of miles you earn depends on the price of the hotel typically. The more expensive the hotel, the more miles earned. For this particular hotel, I was to earn 1,000 base points. However, the site was also offering a bonus 3,000 points if you selected Southwest as your airline of choice and it was your first stay with Rocketmiles. So in total, I was to earn 1,000 base points + 3,000 bonus points for a grand total of 4,000 points.
On top of the bonus miles earned, I was also owed a few other miles from Rocketmiles due to some surveys and referral sign ups. Rocketmiles will not transfer those miles earned until you’ve stayed at a hotel booked through Rocketmiles. I was also eager to find out if those bonus miles would also count for the Southwest Companion Pass.
My stay was on a Friday night and the points showed up just a few days later the next Tuesday morning! Unfortunately, not all points count 🙁
This screen shot shows all the points I’ve earned in my account over the past few days:
This shows the 1,000 points earned from staying at the hotel, plus the 3,000 point bonus, and a few other 1,000 point bonuses I had in my account awaiting account activity so they could be transferred over.
This shows all activity that counts towards the Companion Pass. To see what counts, toggle the “Point Type” drop-down to read “Companion Pass Qualifying Points”. You’ll see that only one 1,000 point transfer from Rocketmiles counted towards the Companion Pass. Not the 3,000 point bonus or any of the other 1,000 point bonuses.
While using Rocketmiles is still a great way to earn Southwest Airlines points and the base bonus points will count, keep this in mind when booking if you are trying to maximize the points earned for the pass. Overall, I am still happy I booked with Rocketmiles as the 4,000 points earned is worth about $60 in Southwest travel. The points I would have earned from Marriott would have been a far less value.
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