Southwest has a new hotel booking website that lets you directly earn Southwest points when reserving a room through the Southwest hotels site.
You can easily earn up to 10,000 Southwest points on a hotel stay, and most hotels are included (although not all offer that many points).
Plus, the points DO qualify for the Southwest Companion Pass, which lets you bring one person FREE with you on Southwest flights for up to two years.
This is how we earned our Companion Pass one year. We were only short by about 20,000 points and booked a local hotel that we did not even stay in because it earned up 10,000 of the points we needed.
Technically, if you could find 10 or 11 hotels that offered at least 10,000 points, you could earn your Companion Pass purely by staying in hotels!