How to Use the Southwest Airlines Low Fare Calendar for Cheap Flights

If you’re a Southwest Airlines frequent flyer and want to get even more value from your Rapid Rewards points, you’ve come to the right place.

Read on as we delve into the airline’s Low Fare Calendar and share some additional Southwest booking tips to help you maximize savings.

What is the Southwest Low Fare Calendar?

The Southwest Low Fare Calendar provides a way to look at the lowest fare available on the airline for any given month and find cheap flights on Southwest. You can search for one way, round-trip or multi-city trips and view the results in dollars or Rapid Rewards points. 

How does the Southwest Low Fare Calendar work?

Southwest uses a fare-based award system, which means that the number of points a flight will cost is based on the cash price of the ticket instead of a fixed award chart. If your dates are flexible, you can book the same trip for fewer Rapid Rewards points depending on when you travel. That’s where the airline’s Low Fare Calendar comes in.

This calendar tool helps you compare prices for different days for an entire month, and you can see multiple months at once. It’s easy to find the price difference if you're considering travel on a different day than you had originally planned.

For the most part, prices are constant each way. However, some days are more expensive than others. But if you are flexible, you could save some points.

You can see the cost to book in points up to six months (or 180 days) in advance

For travel with fixed dates, this calendar view will show you the cheapest award travel available to you on your specific travel dates. If you have some flexibility, this tool is clutch for shopping even more smartly for the cheapest Southwest flights.

» Learn more: The best days to book a flight and when to fly

How to find Southwest Airlines cheap flights with the Low Fare Calendar

To find Southwest’s Low Fare Calendar, head to the airline's desktop website.

Input your destinations and rough travel dates. When the page displays flight options, click the the green Low Fare Calendar button for a broader view.

The next screen will display the lowest-cost flights available per day. You can then click into a date one-by-one to see which flight operated that day is the cheapest Southwest flight.

The cheapest Southwest flights are typically flown in the early morning hours or late in the day.

Though Southwest has a user-friendly mobile app that’s helpful for tracking flights, changing your bookings, and checking in, you can only search for the lowest fares in a calendar view on the airline's website.

» Learn more: How to get a refund on Southwest

Other tips for booking cheap Southwest flights

Use the Low Fare Calendar to rebook your Southwest flight when fares drop

Now that you've mastered the Low Fare Calendar, you can step up your booking game even more.

Southwest has one of the most generous cancellation and change policies of any airline. There’s no fee to cancel or to change your ticket as long as you do so 10 minutes in advance of your flight.

While there’s no fee to change your ticket, you will have to pay the difference in fare. If the flight you’re trying to change to costs more than the price you paid, you’ll pay the difference.

If the price of the flight you want to change to is cheaper, then you’ll be credited back the difference.

With this generous change policy, you can even rebook the same flight you already have paid for and get the difference credited to you. Just find your flight on the website and select "change flight." If the price has dropped from what you originally paid, just "change" the flight and you’ll get the difference back.

If you paid in points, you’ll get refunded in points. If you paid a nonrefundable Wanna Get Away fare, you’ll get a credit in the form of a Travel Fund. Travel Funds are easy to view when you’re logged into your Southwest Rapid Rewards account, and you can apply them to the cost of future flights.

» Learn more: How to rebook and save when Southwest flight prices drop

Use the Southwest Companion Pass to fly someone for next to nothing

What some consider to be the "holy grail" of travel, the Southwest Companion Pass can help Southwest flyers save some serious cash. It’s essentially a "buy one, get one free" coupon that enables you to fly a companion of your choice for nearly free whenever you fly. Just pay the taxes and fees (often only $5.60 each way for domestic flights) and your companion is all set.

The pass is valid for the remainder of the calendar year in which it’s earned, plus the entire next calendar year. If you earn the pass early in the year, you can get almost two full years of nearly free flights for your companion. Plus, you can change your companion up to three times each calendar year. So if you want to take a trip with your spouse, they can be your companion for a flight; later if you want to take another trip with your friend, you can change your companion.

Companion Passes work when you book your trip with Rapid Rewards points, too — you don’t have to pay for your ticket in cash. You could use the Low Fare Calendar to find a cheap round-trip, book with Rapid Reward points and add your companion for a low-cost getaway.

» Learn more: The pros and cons of Southwest's Companion Pass

Find sweet spots using the Southwest Low Fare Calendar

You can also take advantage of the Southwest Low Fare Calendar to find sweet spots for your next trip. For example, Southwest allows you to island hop in Hawaii for less than 5,000 points per flight. Southwest flies to Hawaii nonstop from four California cities: Oakland, San Jose, Sacramento and San Diego.

Southwest services Kauai, Oahu, Maui, and Kona and Hilo on Hawaii.

Not only can you get to Hawaii using Southwest Rapid Rewards, but you can often do so cheaply. It’s not uncommon to find one-way tickets for less than 10,000 Rapid Rewards points from California to Hawaii.

Once you’ve reached Hawaii, it’s also easy to hop around to different islands. Inter-island flights can be found for less than 5,000 points each way. That’s rock-bottom pricing that even beats Hawaiian Airlines — you’ll pay at least 7,500 Hawaiian miles to fly around Hawaii. You could use 6,000 JetBlue TrueBlue points for a one-way flight on Hawaiian Airlines between islands, but Southwest is still the lowest points option. Aloha!