 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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 Flying the airlines used to be the traditional way of collecting miles on airlines for that dream trip, but thanks to the advent of "mileage earning" credit cards (where you earn miles/points based on spend on the credit card) it has become easier than ever to earn those miles to redeem for your dream vacation trip or that future trip which you have been planning for a while. With the help of credit cards, some effort from your end and lot of available techniques you could rack up those miles for your "award travel redemption". Some of these techniques are:
Let's see few methods which you can follow to generate the miles/points on the credit card of your choice by "Buying/Selling gift cards". Method 1: Buy gift card online for merchants that awards points/miles for their gift card purchase and exchanging those gift card in store for more valuable gift card. A common example where above method is used is Sears. Sears usually awards miles/points for purchase of their physical gift cards through various portals. For example if you earn 10 miles/$ spend ( or 10% Cash-back) on purchase of sears gift cards through the portal, later on which you can use to purchase Visa/MasterCard in the store (provided the store sells those and cashier is fine doing it). You could also use Sears gift card to buy other merchant gift cards such as Amazon or Shell (provided they are available and cashier is fine doing it). Purchasing $1k of Sears gift card would generate 10k miles/points ( or $100 cash-back) which could help you for that future trip. Method 2: Buy gift cards online at discounted rate and sell these gift cards at minimal loss on "gift card exchange sites". A common example of these would be to Buy gift cards online on Ebay when Ebay bonuses it by giving percentage discount of 8% or more or 4X or greater bonus Ebay Bucks. These could be then sold to various gift card re-sellers. You could scan through "giftcardgranny" for the resell value you would get before you buy the gift card on Ebay so that you know your profit/loss before hand. Method 3: Buy discounted gifts cards online for merchants that allow buying Visa/MasterCard or other better value merchant gifts card in-store or online using their gift cards. Again Sears would qualify here for in-store gift card purchase using Sears gift card. There are other stores which would allow you to do that. A useful place to browse for this is at Frequent Miler Laboratory. Walmart used to allow using their gift cards to purchase Visa/MasterCard online, but no longer does that. Hope these data helps you to get going in your miles quest for the upcoming trip. |
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