I just need to gush about how awesome having the CP has been.
Use #1: Both my wife and I had a busy, rough month of work. Wife wanted to get away (Southwest literally has a fare class for that!). She wanted to visit her sister in Sacramento since we haven't seen them or the niece/nephew in a while. This was a somewhat pricey trip (about 20k points) but no way would we have done it without that.
Use #2: Wife is an event planner, meaning sometimes travel companies come in and give presentations. Air Emirates came in last year, and raffled off two round trip tickets to Dubai. She won. We ended up going last week (it was awesome!) but had to get to Dallas, Houston, JFK, or LAX. No problem. CP and about 6k points + $22 to the rescue! That means we went round trip to Dubai for essentially the cost of taxes & fees (about $250 total between both airlines) and a few SW points. (And the Air Emirates flight to Dubai ended up being upgraded to Business Class both ways. Lay flat seats, and good food and wine for a 14 hour flight? Yes please.)
Use #3: My mom turns 50 next week. I randomly check flight prices today and they are pretty cheap! I decide to go. Wife says "You want me to come too?" Actually, yes I do! 11k points and $22 later, and we're all booked.
I've been booking work travel on SW to build up points whenever I can. We already have at least one trip that I have to take for work to a city we like (Portland) so she'll just come along too. We've used it three times, have about 80k points left (plus over 100k that we can transfer from Chase if it comes to it) and plenty of work trips that will build up the points.
What was I doing paying for two flights to get everywhere the last two years?!?!