Southwest Notification Vacation: Up to 10,500 Free Rapid Rewards Points (Ends Oct 12)

Southwest's Notification Vacation pays one Rapid Rewards point per unread notification in a screenshot of your phone, 500 minimum and 10,000 maximum, through 5 a.m. Central on October 12, 2026 or until 150 million points are gone. The Burnout Quiz adds 500. The terms, the daily cap, what the points are worth, and the privacy step to take first.

Terms read on Southwest's own promotion pages on October 6, 2026: notificationvacation.com/terms, airplanemode.southwest.com/terms, and the October 5 press release. Point values are ours.

Southwest launched a campaign called "Enter Airplane Mode" on October 5 with two giveaways that pay Rapid Rewards points for a screenshot and a quiz. Together they top out at 10,500 points per member, and no purchase is involved.

Notification Vacation: 1 point per unread notification

Upload a screenshot of your phone's home screen showing your unread notifications at notificationvacation.com. Southwest's terms set the count: one Rapid Rewards point for each qualifying unread notification shown, with a 500-point minimum and a 10,000-point maximum, one submission and one award per member.

Window: 5:00 a.m. Central on October 5 to 5:00 a.m. Central on October 12, 2026, or earlier if the 150 million points set aside are gone.
Daily cap: about 21 million points are released each day. Once a day's allocation is claimed, verified submissions later that day get nothing; unused points roll into the next day. At the 10,000-point cap, 21 million points is as few as 2,100 maxed-out screenshots before a day's pool closes, so earlier in the day is better.
What counts: the screenshot has to be captured during the window, from a device you own or regularly use, and show your genuine unread notifications. Altered, stitched, duplicated or generated screenshots are void, and Southwest's count is final. The terms say they use image analysis, metadata and device identifiers to verify.
Privacy step first: the terms themselves tell you to turn off or hide message previews before you capture the screenshot, without changing the unread count. Do that; you are sending a picture of your home screen to an airline.

Burnout Quiz: 500 points

Take the quiz at airplanemode.southwest.com. Every eligible member who finishes it gets 500 Rapid Rewards points, once, from a separate pool of 37 million. It runs from October 5 to 11:59 p.m. Central on December 10, 2026, or until the pool is gone. Southwest's page showed 66,157 completions on the evening of October 6.

Both giveaways

Rapid Rewards membership is required (free to join), you must be 18 or older and a resident of the 50 states or D.C., and Southwest employees and their households are excluded.
One entry and one award per person and per account; using more than one account voids it.
Points post within about 7 days after Southwest verifies the entry; a confirmation screen is not verification.
The points do not count toward A-List, A-List Preferred or Companion Pass qualification. They are spendable points only.

What 10,500 points is worth

Rapid Rewards points price against Southwest's own cash fares, and we value them at 1.3 cents each on Wanna Get Away fares. At that rate the full 10,500 is about $137 of Southwest flights; the 500-point floor from the screenshot alone is about $6.50, and the quiz's 500 is another $6.50. Rapid Rewards points don't expire, so a partial haul sits in the account until a fare sale makes it useful; our sale-by-sale pricing of Southwest fares this year shows what a 10,000-point balance buys when a sale hits.

The real question: should you bother?

If you already have a Rapid Rewards number, yes: it is two minutes for a floor of 500 points and a ceiling of 10,000, and the only thing you give up is a screenshot of your home screen with previews hidden. If you don't have a number, joining is free and the entry works the same day. Just don't dress up the screenshot: the terms reserve the right to claw back points from any entry they decide was altered, and the whole thing is tied to your account.

Do this with your own numbers

Transfer partners — every program, ratio and live transfer bonus, checked daily
Purchase optimizer — run your own spending through the same numbers this article used