@kcaminiti021 wrote:
I have been a RR member and a RR Visa member for over 20 years. They used to be great with the coupons. It seemed like almost every time I booked rewards travel they sent me coupons. It was awesome. I don't know what exact changes have happened to this program but I used to have so many I couldn't use them all, and now, I never get any. They've gotten stingy with the drink coupons. Luckily other passengers are very gracious and honestly so are the flight attendants. Last several flight I took the flight attendant didn't charge me for my drink and/or I got free drink coupons from surrounding passengers. So nice!!!
In the old Rapid Rewards program, you received 4 drink coupons each time you earned a free flight. For those with the Southwest credit card, this was pretty frequent. Which led to a lot of people having a lot of drink coupons. At that time, drink coupons didn't list an expiration date. Carrying the potential cost for all of those coupons on their balance sheets became a liability for Southwest, so they infamously declared all existing, non-dated coupons to be null and void after an arbitrary expiration date. That was the beginning of a major shift in how drink coupons are distributed. Now, customers who have opted-in receive 4 coupons after each set of 10 paid flights. So earning is much, much slower. Chase also used to send them with greater frequency, but now they only send to a small set of customers on "milestone" anniversaries.
Luckily, as you said, FAs are fairly generous with free drinks (unofficially on any delayed flight). 😉
