Get Air Miles for Shopping Online!

On the first of of my blog I started discussing Delta. Mostly everything I hold dear to my heart about Delta is gone. As the recession hit the wonderful Delta benefits also disappeared.

As I mentioned on the the first blog, every major airline site has a mall. I have become an on-line shopper.As many of you have .You will go to Macys.com, Nordstroms.con, Barnes and Noble.com,etc. But you only get your merchandise and 1 miles for using your credit card. That's where the new training must start.

I hope by now you all have gotten a frequent flyer number for all the major airlines. At this point please find the mall. To find it press find the name of the frequent flyer such as Dividend Miles, Skymiles, Worldperks, Aadvantage,etc. Navigate this part of the site. You will see numerous ways to earn miles. Look for partners (dining, shopping, etc) that will get you to the mall. Register your frequent flyer number with the mall. This is very important, because if you are not logged into the mall you will not get the miles. It is different than logging into the frequent flyer home page.

Now we are logged in, start looking at the stores that are on the site. It will show you how many miles you will get per dollar spent. This is a big part of how I travel for free. My favorite stores to shop on are Drugstores.com,magazines.com, shoes.com and many others.

This past month Delta had a promotion with shoes.com when you shop on the site through Delta skymiles mall you will receive 15 miles per dollar, no shipping , no tax, and a $20 coupon if you spend over $100. So I bought 2 pairs of sneakers for myself and 2 for my son and while I was sitting in my house in my PJ's I got 3000 skymiles plus the miles from using my credit card.

Drugstore. com also is having a promotion with Delta now, get 9 miles per dollar. So I purchased toothpaste, mouthwash, my shampoo and conditioner, q-tips, etc. I got discounts and used coupons and had no shipping fee and got 450 skymiles. It was delivered to my house the next day. I didn't use any gas and I shopped at 1am. Drugstore.com works like CVS when you are a repeat customer you get bucks back to use in the upcoming months. Last month I had $15.48 in my account to spend this month. So to me this is a fantastic way to shop.

I mentioned that I used a credit card to shop, an important piece of information is that you DO NOT have to have the airline credit card to shop on the mall. You can use any credit card.

Last Christmas season my Starwood American express card was targeted to recieve double points when I shopped on-line, well that was fantastic for me. During the holiday season starting sometime in October all the airline malls start their promotions( which is a great benefit to us because that means more miles for us). Barnes and Noble.com was offering through the Delta site 8 miles per dollar and they were allowing you to purchase gift cards on this offer. Every year we give out about $500 worth of gift cards to various people and plus my kids love the store so I purchased a few extra for a total of $700. When doing the math, I received 5600 miles plus the 2 from my Starwood card(1400) and then I took it a step further, once the cards came in I went on-line to shop on Barnes and Noble .com and used the $200 in gift cards to purchase merchandise at the store so I got an additional 8 miles per dollar for the books and CD's, which comes to an additional 1600 miles. Sitting in my nice warm house, no traffic, no crowds, I got 8600 points to put in my "travel bank".Not a bad return on my $700 I would have spent
anyway.

I will share many of these stories with you as we go on.

Just to give you food for thought, I booked us two first class tickets to Italy which cost me $90 for the taxes. Each ticket if I paid for them (which of course I can't afford) is $3800, yes that is correct, $3800 for one, that is $7400 for the two. Pretty cool if you ask me.