 One of the often overlooked aspect of earning miles is through shopping. Various rebate/shopping portals offers miles, points or cashback when you click through their website. In addition to that there a various promotional offers usually from shopping portals affiliated with various airlines where in addition to advertised rate of earning miles for giving merchant you earn additional miles for spending specific total $ amount within given time frame. Since most of the merchants today participate with rebate/shopping portal sites, it is important to compare the miles, points or cashback you would receive going through a specific portal. The two good rate comparison meta-sites are Cashbackmonitor and Cashbackholic. When you search for a merchant; both of these websites list all the cashback portals and their rates for a given merchant (Do check the actual cashback, as in rare occasions the rates shown by meta-sites may be different then shown on the cashback portal). When selecting a particular portal it is important to know few things below:
 Cashbackmonitor rates for Ebags.com with top 2 portal earnings in each category As you can see from above that you can either earn 20% cashback from Topcashback or 24 points/$ from British Airways shopping portal. Assuming you assign a value of 1 cent/miles to British Airways miles and it is one of program where you actively collect miles you are essentially getting a value of 24% cashback at British Airways shopping portal. If you are not into British Airways miles (also known as BA Avios) then the second best offer is to go with 20% cashback.
You can also stack the shopping portal rebate when any other merchant discount codes (provided the rebate portal terms does not exclude it) as well as American Express Sync offers for the given merchant. So next time you shop make sure to go through these rebate portals to maximize your miles/points or cashback earnings.
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 As someone who would collect miles and points in various airlines and hotel reward programs it is inevitable that there are times when your miles/points are expiring and you want to extend it if possible. One of popular currency is Avianca Lifemiles. Lifemiles keeps having promotion every 3 months or so where you can buy miles cheaply for as low as 1.375 cents/mile when you buy 50k+ miles. But what if you have miles in your account but no travel plans and then the time comes when the miles are about to expire? The easiest way to extend the life of your expiring miles is to purchase miles at the cost of US $33 + tax per 1000 miles or to transfer small chunk of miles (Starting at 1000 miles) to friend or family account at a cost of US $15 + tax per 1000 miles. There is another option though where it does not have to cost you any money and that is by donating your miles. Most of the programs requires you to donate minimum of 1000 miles or more to participating charitable organization, but Lifemiles allows you to donate 1 mile and extend the life of your miles by ~24 months. You can go to the homepage here and go to "Donate Miles" as shown below or you can go to the Donate Miles link here.  You can go to the "Donate Miles" option to donate your miles So next time you are close to expiration of your Lifemiles just donate 1 mile and extend the life for 24 more months without buying or transferring any miles. If you are interested in subtle tips and value on lifemiles check out this flyertalk thread.
Disclosure: Miles And Money could earn referral bonus for sign up through some of the links above. Some of the links may or may not be publicly available links.  If you stay in the USA and can sign up for credit cards then the one card you should have in your wallet is the American Express Hilton Card. American Express has two variants of the card below: If you do not have Hilton HHonors card then it is better off to start with the $75 annual fee version as apart from better benefits it also has higher sign up bonus such as the current 100k Hilton Honors point for $3k spend in 3 months and a free weekend night earned after first anniversary of the card membership.
After first anniversary of the Hilton HHonors Surpass card once you receive the free weekend night certificate you can downgrade the card to No annual fee Hilton HHonors card. The Deal:
Disclosure: Miles And Money could earn referral bonus for sign up through some of the links above. Some of the links may or may not be publicly available links.  Update: You can now earn 1 Delta Skymiles per $1 spend on Lyft ride and till 08/31/2017 you can earn additional 2 Delta Skymiles per $1 on airport rides with Lyft. Link your accounts here. lyft is a ride-sharing service which is a smaller competitor of UBER. Lyft is competitively priced for rides compared to UBER. In the earlier post we discussed earning $2 in SYWR points for UBER rides. lyft also has partnership with jetBlue where you can earn jetBlue miles as a rider and if you drive with lyft you can also earn Shell Fuel discount. You can link your lyft account to earn the discount here. You can also find all the "riders" promotion here. Earning 1200 jetBlue points annually: You can earn 30 points with each of the ride with Lyft (except Line service). In total you can earn 1200 jetBlue points annually which although small it still is free and earned automatically. If you are new to lyft or jetBlue you could also earn bonus $20 for lyft ride or 750 points with jetBlue.  This is how the connect page for lyft looks like. Login from PC in your lyft account to link your jetBlue account. Above is how the connect page looks like at lyft. Just login to your lyft account and go here and link your jetBlue account number to start earning jetBlue miles/points. Although the amount of jetBlue miles/points you earn are limited they are still free.
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AuthorI love traveling / backpacking. This blog focuses on below 3 aspects of travel: Archives
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