I called SWA and asked if free nights at hotels paid for with hotel points will count towards the bonus. The answer was yes. Now let's just hope that these bonus points post with better reliability than those from the usual car rental offers, which have been difficult lately. I'm still fighting for 0.5 RR credit with Alamo in regards to a rental completed months ago.

I also looked into the link details and there's something odd about it. At the very end of the string the RR number is one leading zero followed by the first eight of the nine digits in my RR account number. That is, the URL ends with "first_name=Name&rr_number=0nnnnnnnn". In the email received by my daughter the same thing happened. There might be wisdom in doing a little link editing to make completely sure your RR number is really activated for the promotion.