Irwin Alvarado

Hi everyone, quick question...

I've had the Chase Southwest Rapid Rewards card for almost 5 years now and since i moved to California i rarely use it. When I lived in Texas it used to be a great way to earn free flights pretty quickly with my travel within the state and occasional spending on it to get credits.

I think that I received 16 credits when I got that card and for about 2 or 3 years I was able to milk about 4 or 5 round trip awards out of it.


Well, I'm about to start to spend on some new AA Citi Cards and I will have no use for Rapid Rewards anymore. Do you think it might be a good idea to close it and open it again in the future in order to get the 50k points bonus? I have some concerns about that:

1 - That's one of my oldest cards (I'm kind of young) so I don't want to affect my credit by closing one of my oldest accounts.

2 - Will I be entitled to the bonus if I was already a Chase-SW client? Or do I need to wait a perid of time after closing it?

3 - Would it be possible to just open a new account to get the bonus without closing the older card?


I know that card has a fee, and maybe it's just stupid to keep it open. The only reason that I kept it is because my wife and I travel often to Texas to visit famility and it's probably our most common route so I been wanting to keep earning points.

But now that I am learning more about card churning I think there might be a better way for us to maximize those points. What do you guys think?

Thanks,
Irwin


EDIT:

After doing a little bit of research it seems that the card that I have is simply called "Southwest Airlines Rapid Rewards" and the ones being offered right now are "Southwest Airlines Rapid Rewards Plus" and "Southwest Airlines Rapid Rewards Premier".

So maybe it's safe to assume that they are different card and that I can qualify for the points if I get the new ones?

JaysonW

Instead of closing the card, why don't you see if Chase will let you PC to the British Airways Visa? I hear Avios points are highly valued when you use them to purchase domestic AA flights.

windcloud5

You should be able to get your bonus points for either the SW Plus or SW Premier. There's even a possibility that you can get the points for both.
In regard to your orginal SW card, if you don't want to keep it, ask chase if they can downgrade your card to a no fee card. If it's downgradable, you wouldn't lose your credit history with the no fee card.

sdsearch

It depends. Avios points are highly valued when you use them for nonstop domestic AA flights. But they're a much poorer value if you have to use connecting domestic AA flights. Thus they only tend to work either for someone who lives near an AA "cornerstone" city (ORD/JFK/MIA/DFW/LAX), or who only needs to fly to the limited number of cities AA flies to from non-"cornerstone" cities.

The reason: Avios charges for each leg separately. So when you connect once, you get charged double. If you connect twice, you get charged triple.