Opinion Outpost Now Offering MileagePlus Miles

Earlier this week, I received an email from Opinion Outpost, one of the survey companies I participate in, notifying me that they are offering MileagePlus miles as a reward option now.

Opinion Outpost is a survey company that offers rewards for completing surveys

I was excited at first at a new way to earn MileagePlus award miles. That was until I saw the conversation rates:

This might not mean anything until I mention that Opinion Outpost points can be exchanged for cash at the following ratio:

Therefore, the 350 points it would take to earn 1,000 MileagePlus miles could earn you $35.00 as well. This is the almost the same cost of buying them directly from United.

In addition, Opinion Outpost is notorious for having you take surveys for 15 minutes and kicking you out. This results in you earning zero points. A lose-lose situation.

Lesson here: always comparison shop! What looks like a good deal on its face, but not look good from its behind.

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MyPoints and United: Win/Win Partnership!

I have been a member of MyPoints since at least 2005 and been very very very satisfied ever since.

MyPoints describes itself as "a reward network, just like when you earn miles on an airline or cash-back on a credit card. The difference is that MyPoints is flexible. You don't have to stick with one store to earn Points, and you don't have to take your rewards in just one form."

MyPoints offer thousands of different reward options from gift cards to cash. One of those available rewards is United miles. Currently, you have the chance to turn your MyPoints points into either 2,500 or 5,000 MileagePlus miles.

There are many ways to earn points though MyPoints:

The other way is to use the MyPoints shopping portal to purchase from your favorite stores:

I would recommend using the United MileagePlus shopping portal over MyPoints portal, as described here.

The way to earn United miles through MyPoints is during the sign-up process.  By using this link, one can earn 250 United Miles for signing up with MyPoints and 750 more award miles for making a $25+ purchase through their shopping portal within 30 days of signing-up. Go here to find the link to the offer.

A similar offer was sent to me via email last week (third week of July), so check your emails as well.

The terms and condition of the 750 additional award miles state:

This is a great offer to participate to earn miles. At the very least its 250 free miles. A little work and transferring a purchase can net you 750 more.

This is a win-win promotion!
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Earn Miles and Join A Gym

If you want to still accomplish your New Year's Resolution of getting in shape, United would like to help.

United has partnered with 1,000's of gyms to offer 2,000 MileagePlus miles for signing-up for a new gym membership.

If you go to this website, you can type in your zipcode to see what gyms are participating in the program.

A few key notes about this program from their FAQ:

       1) You are purchasing your gym membership through MileagePlus/Global Fitness
   
       2) You will be billed by Global Fitness, not your local gym

       3) There is a one-time processing fee of $39

       4) Some gyms offer a Non-Commitment contract, but it includes a $49 Activation Fee

       5) To cancel your membership, you have to send written correspondence to Global Fitness

On first look this was a great offer. After digging down into the conditions, this offer has to many additional costs to make the 2,000 miles worth it.

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Earn Miles By Transferring from Points.com

This is again one of those "I don't know if this is the best value for your miles, please do your research, have your goal and see if this is the best way to earn miles" posts. Points.com is a website that helps track your point balances in your frequent flyer accounts.

The service is free and has helped me keep track of my account numbers for airline and hotel loyalty programs. One of the most unique features of Points.com is the ability to trade or swap points between two different loyalty programs. I will discuss both options below:

Trade Points

Points.com allows you the opportunity to trade your points in one particular loyalty program with someone else's points in another loyalty program. The trade could be 1:1 or another amount.  Here are some examples of trades that were offered to me:

To complete the trade you will have to pay a fee. As you can see, the fee gets more expensive as the amount miles being trade increases. Is this a good deal? It depends on the offer and your need at the moment.

Swap Points

The other options is to swap points from one loyalty program to another. The transfer rates depend upon the program. For instance, here is what you would need to trade to earn 1,000 United Mileage Plus miles:

None of the transfer rates are particularly attractive. If you have orphan points in a loyalty account transferring to another program might be a good idea. However, transferring points just to earn more Mileage Plus miles is a terrible idea.

Below is a list of loyalty programs participating with Points.com:

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Send Flowers and Earn Miles

Do you need to send flowers to that special someone in your life or just one of your family and friends that you feel would appreciate a good bouquet of flowers or gift basket? If you do and are considering using FTD flowers, you might also consider earning some United miles in the process.

Currently, FTD and United are offering you 25 points per $1 spent on flowers and gifts purchased through FTD.

FTD places the number of miles you will earn under each product. For instance, this bouquet earns 1,000 miles:

It is important for me to point out that you may be paying a premium for earning miles for with your purchase. For instance, the same flower arrangement above is only $34.99 when going through FTD.com directly, not through United's link.

In this case, $5 extra for 1000 miles might be worth it. Here is another example, the opening page of FTD shows an offer for roses at $19.99:

Here is the bouquet for $19.99, very nice.

Now here is the opening page through the United FTD link:

And that same bouquet of colored roses is now $39.99:

Is paying $20 more for 1,000 miles worth it? That's a personal choice.  

As you can see, you need to comparison shop when receiving an incentive from flower companies online. In addition, I believe these products are quite more expensive than just the flowers at the store down the street or with your local florist. I have found that the delivery charges are also quite steep. But, if you are doing some comparison shopping of the different vendors and what you are comfortable spending...you might as well check out the options!

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Earn Miles Through Booking Hotels on Rocket Miles or PointsHound

                       
Update: Pointshound and United broke up. You can't United miles throuh them any more :(

If you have some hotel stays coming up and are looking for a way to earn miles beyond the general bonuses that you can earn with hotel programs check out the websites, Rocket Miles and PointsHound.                                                                                    
These new websites allow you to book hotels in certain cities that will allow you to earn miles in your participating airline partner, in our case United. There are some good reviews out on both RocketMiles and PointsHound and their value. It never hurts to check to see what rates you might be able to find and the potential extra United miles you can earn by simply going through these different portals.

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Earn Miles By Transferring From Hotel Points - Not A Good Value

Now I put a disclaimer in the title of this post because I think that you, usually, lose most of your value of points when you transfer them from hotel programs to airline programs. But, in an effort to disclose ALL of the different ways to earn miles I wanted to quickly talk about why I don't think it's the best way to earn some miles. Now, as always, your miles and goals may differ from mine or others. So if you find that you are short of an award and may not use those Wyndham points you have sitting around and they are better transferred to United for an award you have...then it might be worth considering. I did just that last year to top off my United account and use Wyndham points I never was going to use.

But the thing is...most of the time there is little value in transferring from hotel to airline because the ratio is often not very good. For example SPG points to United miles transfer at a 2:1 ratio...so you lose half of your value right away...despite a 5,000 bonus for every 20,000 you transfer. But, SPG does have some options with other partners that are at a 1:1 that might be an option, but as I said...just be very careful to think of the earned value of those hotel points and if they are better held for hotel uses, rather than airline uses.

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eRewards: The Turtle of Earning Miles/Points

eRewards is a site that pays you for taking surveys in miles/points. This is not an easy way to earn miles/points. It can take months just to earn 2,000 airline miles. Why bother you might ask? In the past, airlines have offered bonuses for transferring miles from partners like eRewards.

The first step is to register with e-Rewards. My recommendation is to search your email for e-Reward offers. Many times airlines and hotels will send emails inviting you to join e-Rewards and included in that email is sign-up bonus offers. A quick search of my email turned up offers from JetBlue, Southewest, and Priority Club in the past 60 days.

Jetblue:

Southwest

 Priority Club:

Also in my email account was an offer from United Airlines offering 250 miles for setting up your profiles and completing a survey in 3 months:

If you can't find an offer in your email box, United has the same offer available here.

After registering for e-Rewards, the next step is to fill out your profile. It is important to be honest in this step as it will determine what surveys are sent to you. If you stretch the truth in your profile, you might start noticing that you don't qualify for any surveys they sent you. There are 9 different sections that you need to fill out to complete your profile:

Here is a sample of the questions you will have to answer:

After filling out your profiles completely, sit back and wait for eRewards to email you invites to surveys. I typically get at least 5 invites a week. Each email looks something similar to this and lets you know the subject of the survey, the time commitment, and payout:

Click on the link within the email and you enter the landing page of the survey. This page will have the same information as the email except it also has the amount you will be paid for testing out of the survey. Being paid for testing out of the survey is one of my favorite parts of eRewards. They give you something for trying. That is why I always attempt to take surveys, nothing to lose.

After completing or testing out of surveys, your account is typically credited immediately; however, some surveys have taken a few days to credit. Once your account has at least $25 in it, you have the option to cash out in exchange for miles. Currently, eRewards allows you to transfer to the following airlines: Air France/KLM, AeroMexico, AirTran, Alaskan, AA, Emirates, Etihad, Fronteir, Hawaiian, Iberia, Jetblue, Southwest, Spirt, US Airways, United, Virgin America and Atlantic. Here is a list of all the partners:

As we have been talking about earning Mileage Plus miles this month, here are the redemption options for United:

After choosing your redemption level, you will be asked to enter your MileagePlus number and eRewards password. Typically, the miles will show up in your MileagePlus account within 3 weeks, but eRewards warns it could take 6-8 weeks. Therefore, this is not a way to transfer miles to your account for an immediate award purchase. Here is some important information about transferring miles to MileagePlus:

Overall, eRewards is a great way to earn a handful of miles. It's time consuming and the payout isn't huge. However, if United has another partner bonus like they did in December, it would be nice to be ready. A little bit of time now can payoff later. 

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Earn Miles Through Your Electricity Bill?

Are you a resident of Connecticut, Illinois, Maryland Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Texas?? There might be an opportunity for you to earn some United miles by switching your electricity provider.

United has a partnership with Energy Plus for residents of CT, IL, MD, MA, NJ, NY, PA, OH and TX to earn miles for switching their electricity provide.

Customers that switch their provide earn 5,000 miles after their second month as a customer. In addition, customers earn 2 miles for every $1 spent on the suppy side of your electricity bill. MileagePlus card members earn 3 miles for every $1 spent.

I am confused about two parts of this. First, I am not completely sure that the extra mile earn for being a MileagePlus card member isn't the 1 mile per $1 earn with the card anyway.  Second, the landing page for this offer states that "as a special offer, MileagePlus credit card embers automatically earn an additional bonus," but it doesn't finish the sentence. One can only assume its 7,500 miles as the graphic next to it says, "up to 7,500 Award Miles." Take a screen shot of the offer page if you decide to participate in this offer.

To further complicate things, according to this flyertalk page, residents in some states might be able to earn even more bonus miles for signing up.

Residents in Texas have a second option to earn miles: Reliant.

The offer for Reliant members is 15,000 miles for signing up and then an additional 500 miles per month for 24 months for a total of 27,000 miles.

I don't pay for electricity (love paying a flat fee each month, reason why my bedroom is always at 60 degrees), so I don't have a way to test this offer out. In the FlyerTalk thread above there has been mixed reaction to the cost of switching providers. Some say the cost is the same or less than their current providers. Others have indicated massive, 200 or 300% increases in the costs. A quick search online shows similar results. All I can say is that participating in this promotion is a gamble, but sometimes you win at gambling and other times you lose....


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Earn Miles While Renting A Car

Just like you should ensure that you can get the biggest bang for your buck while at a hotel by looking to see if you can earn both hotel and airline points for a hotel stay, you should also explore your options when renting a car.

United has a page full of their preferred rental car providers as well as other providers they have relationships with. The full list is available here.

Each company has their own offers but there seems to be a decent value from a few of the providers like Hertz and Avis where you can earn 75 miles per day and then 50 bonus miles per day. If you book through United.com (which I doubt is a good value) you can earn 150 miles. I don't rent cars that often, for one I am just about to turn 25 so it's quite expensive, but I usually go to places that have good public transit or try to rough it and not have a car if I don't have to so this doesn't do much for me. But if you can get a good rate and provide your United number to earn some bonus miles along the way, it's always a good idea!


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Earn United Miles, Drink Wine! Double Win!

If you are a big fan of earning miles as well as finding ways to try new wines then you might be interested in joining a wine club that will earn you United Miles.

United has a deal with the Vinesse wine club  where you can sign up and order a batch of six wines for $6.99 per bottle and a small shipping charge and you will earn 6,500 MileagePlus miles. It looks like you can customize your order to get a mix of reds and whites or just red only or white wine only packages. I haven't tried the wines they have on offer so I can't speak to the quality of the wine. But if you are an adventurous wine drinker or need to get a few bottles to for a party or to just keep on hand, might as well consider earning some miles while doing it! Again this may not be the best bang for your buck, but our goal this month was to consider every possible avenue to earn miles. Make sure you do some research to see if this meets your needs!

Vinesse Wine Clubs Join American Cellars Wine Club, brought to you by Vinesse, and earn 5,000 bonus award miles for your first two shipments, plus five miles per $1 USD spent on any additional orders. For your first shipment, you’ll enjoy six hand-selected wines for only $6.99 per bottle plus 1 cent shipping – that’s more than 50% off. Visit our website to learn more.1 Website: www.united.com/vinessewines Special offer for all MileagePlus credit cardmembers and Premier members: Earn up to 6,500 miles and for your first shipment, receive six wines for only $6.99 per bottle plus 1 cent shipping – more than 50% off. Learn more

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