Southwest Rapid Rewards

1.44 cents per point: the median of 10 cash-versus-award pairs read off the program's own booking engine on 2026-09-08, logged out, one search after another in the same session. Ten routes, two in each of five bands of nonstop block time, all departing 2026-10-15 one way: DAL–HOU, LAS–LAX, BWI–MCO, MDW–DEN, MDW–PHX, BWI–DEN, MDW–SAN, MDW–LAX, SAN–BWI, BWI–LAS. For each route the flight sampled is the airline-operated nonstop with the lowest economy award price that day, and the award and the cash price both come from that one flight. Southwest sells one cabin, so no route carries a premium row; what it sells instead is four tiers of that cabin, every one of them priced in points as well as dollars, so each pair compares a fare against itself. The counted tier is Choice rather than Basic: Basic is the stripped product, and it is not always sold — it is missing from five of the sixty-eight nonstops read, in both currencies, while Choice is sold on every one. Basic is recorded beside each counted row so the substitution can be computed. Taxes are $5.60 on every award, the September 11th Security Fee and the whole of what Southwest adds to a points booking. The recorded select-depart.html URL is honoured cold: fetched with no cookies and no prior session it returns 200 with no redirect. The cash search is the same URL with fareType=USD. A shorter select.html URL carrying only part of the parameter set is redirected to the empty booking form, which is why this session began by driving the form. Each pair is (cash fare minus award taxes) divided by award points. Economy alone medians 1.44c, and substituting the cheaper economy fare across the same 10 rows would give 1.42c. Every figure is a live price on a bookable date, and it will move. The rows themselves are on this page above, with the search that produced each one.