Originally Posted by
sdsearch
It's irrelevant to this discussion anyway, because the "loopholes" for earning lots of Southwest awards fast through hotel partners (and most specifically, partners of those hotel partners, like Amtrak), and for doing three-way transfers, are long closed up. And Southwest itself uses Chase.
If you are willing to stay in cheap Choice Hotels, and they have one of their occasional huge bonus periods like summer 2009, you can still do halfway OK converting to WN (but they have since devalued).
I took my son to Disneyworld last summer and we Choice-hopped for 13 days, mostly along the dreaded Irlo Bronson. A pain, but depending how you look at it, we got almost free hotel stays, or the equivalent in WN credits. We only used the place to crash and shower.
Free airfare, annual passes to the World, almost free hotels, and Star Wars Weekends. Priceless.
This may only be useful to top off for a Companion Pass, where those last few credits are of immense value each. For just getting WN RR awards, there are probably better ways. Of course (as you well know, sdsearch), Choice has a history of hosing its point holders with little or no warning, so there is some risk.
And as far as I know, if you spend $200 in a calendar year on Amtrak, you can still use the old 1000 CO> 1000 Amtrak> 3000 Choice > .75 RR credit, with a limit of 25000/50000 out from Amtrak a year. That could be a timely dump into RR.
But the glory days are over.