- Day 1 – What’s Travel Hacking all about?
- Day 2 – Getting Organized
- Day 3 – Types of Miles and Points
- Day 4 – Credit Card Strategy
- Day 5 – Southwest Companion Pass
- Day 6 – Business Credit Cards
- Day 7 – Hotel Free Night Sign-Up Bonuses & Annual Certificates
- Day 8 – How to Apply & Track
- Day 9 – Not Instantly Approved
- Day 10 – Meeting the Spending Requirement
- Day 11 – Cancel or Keep?
- Day 12 – Keep Miles from Expiring
While sign-up bonuses are quickest way to earn large amount of miles and points, there are many other ways to earn miles without actually flying. One of my favorites is with shopping portals.
Shopping portals are easy way to earn miles and points (or cashback) for online purchases. There are many sites including airline and hotels that will give you miles and points for shopping at online stores through a link they provide. They receive a referral payment from the store and kick some of it back to you.
The hard part is that there are dozens of different shopping portals and the amount of miles, points, or cash back they provide at a certain store is always changing. The good news is there are a handful of websites that track the amount each shopping portal is offering so you can make an easy decision on which shopping portal to use.
The three main comparison sites are:
Here is what each looks like:
I used to always use evreward.com but I switched and have been using cashbackmonitor.com the most. I found cashbackmonitor.com to track more shopping portals than evreward.com and I like the search results better than cashbackholic.com. Feel free to use whichever one you like best.
Here’s an example on how lucrative it can be to use a shopping portal. Let’s say your wife wants a Tory Burch purse for her birthday that she saw at Neiman Marcus. It’s $495. You can buy it in store and use your favorite credit card and earn miles or points on $495 + tax. Or you can search for Neiman Marcus on one of the above shopping portal comparison sites and see that BritishAirway’s shopping portal is currently giving you 18 miles per dollar spent when you buy something through their Neiman Marcus link.
By simply clicking on the link at cashbackmonitor.com, it will bring you directly to British Airways Mall shopping portal that looks like this:
Be sure to login to your British Airways account and after clicking on the ‘Shop Now’ button to be brought directly to NeimanMarcus.com after seeing this pop-up box:
Now just search for the Tory Burch purse and buy it with any credit card you want. You will receive the credit card points that you would have if you had purchased in store but you will also now receive 8910 British Airways Avios miles. ($495 x 18 = 8910) – shopping portals typically don’t give you points on tax and shipping costs.
Did you know that 7,500 British Airways Avios miles will get you a free US domestic non-stop flight under 1,150 miles on American Airlines or Alaska Airlines. A free airline ticket just for buying a purse that you were going to buy anyway.
Typically the shopping portal will email you within a few days that you successfully earned miles. Here is an email from American Airlines shopping portal that I used to buy my daughter contact lenses:
Shopping portal are a great way to earn double miles and points (through the shopping portal and with the payment credit card) for online shopping purchased. While usually not a large amount of miles with a single transaction, if you make it a habit to constantly use a portal the miles and points will add up quickly.
We haven’t reviewed how to keep miles and points from expiring yet – don’t worry there is an upcoming unit on it. While the miles earned in some frequent flier programs never expire, most programs have rules where your miles will expire after a certain amount of time if there is no activity on the account. Using a shopping portal to earn a few miles is an easy way to earn a few miles which count as ‘activity’ on your account and keep your hard earned miles from expiring.
Need to Knows
- Always, Always, Always use a shopping portal to earn extra miles, points, or cashback when shopping online
- Earning miles through shopping portals are an easy way to keep your miles and points from expiring
