All these portal bonuses have now expired.
Several shopping portals are offering bonuses when meeting spending thresholds.
Upromise
Spend $250 & earn $10 bonus.Spend $1,250 & earn $100 bonus.Expires November 10, 2019.Direct link to offer.
Alaska Airlines
- Spend $150 & earn 300 bonus miles.
- Spend $300 & earn 750 bonus miles.
- Spend $500 & earn 1,500 bonus miles.
- Expires November 21, 2019.
- Direct link to offer.
American Airlines
- Spend $150 & earn 500 bonus miles.
- Spend $600 & earn 1,500 bonus miles.
- Spend $1,200 & earn 3,500 bonus miles.
- Expires November 21, 2019.
- Direct link to offer.
United
- Spend $150 & earn 500 bonus miles.
- Spend $750 & earn 2,500 bonus miles.
- Spend $1500 & earn 5,000 bonus miles.
- Expires November 21, 2019.
- Direct link to offer.
Delta
Spend $150 & earn 500 bonus miles.Spend $300 & earn 1,000 bonus miles.Expires November 14, 2019.Direct link to offer.
Southwest
- Spend $150 & earn 500 bonus points.
- Spend $500 & earn 1,000 bonus points.
- Spend $1,000 & earn 3,000 bonus points.
- Expires November 21, 2019.
- Direct link to offer.
Tips & Ideas
The terms of these promotions exclude gift card purchases, but I think that’s just generic wording seeing as gift card purchases don’t normally track through portals.
Most or all of these portals offer miles/cashback on purchases from Raise and GiftCards.com. Based on past data points from Middle Age Miles (e.g. here and here), purchases from GiftCards.com do trigger these bonuses, so I suspect the same is true when buying gift cards from Raise.
As a result, the Upromise offer is the most juicy. Spending $1,500 on Visa gift cards from GiftCards.com would earn you the standard 1% cashback ($15) plus the bonus for spending at least $1,250 ($100). $115 cashback on $1,500 of Visa gift cards is an incredible deal and that’s before taking into account your actual credit card rewards. You could just spend $1,250 on VGCs, but seeing as you’d have to buy at least three of them anyway, you might as well buy three $500 cards.
Even Raise purchases work out to be a decent deal with Upromise. Spending exactly $1,250 would earn you the regular 2% back ($25) plus the $100 bonus. That total of $125 is therefore 10% back on your $1,250 spend in addition to the savings you’re getting from the already discounted gift cards. If you’re targeted for the BoA Cash Rewards promo, you’d also earn 9% cashback for some excellent savings.
Note that some of these portal bonuses end at different times. It might therefore be worth hitting the bonuses that end sooner, especially if you won’t have a hard time meeting the spending thresholds for several bonuses.
Great tips…. thanks for this
Glad it helped 🙂
Hi Stephen – Many thanks for the shout-out. I was trying to get a post up this morning about these deals but too much to do trying to get out of town! Yes, I can confirm that GC purchases from GC.com *do* trigger the airline portal bonuses. I’ve never tried this on UPromise, so I can’t speak directly to that one. I’ll probably try it this time though 🙂 These are great portal bonuses. Have an awesome weekend! ~Craig
Yep, I think I’m going to have to give Upromise a try too – too good of a deal to let it pass.
Question on UPromise Cashback: I’m having a hard time understanding this offer. It says CashBack, but really it’s cashback to the Upromise account and it needs to transfer to a 529 College Savings account, right? In other words, there’s no way to cash it out?
Once you have an account, under membership profile, you can just add a regular checking or savings account and cash out once it becomes payable.
Thanks for the help Charlie!
[…] Several shopping portals ran promotions last month offering bonus miles or cashback when hitting certain spending thresholds. I’d mentioned in that post that it should be possible to buy gift cards from GiftCards.com or Raise in order to earn those bonuses seeing as those two stores earned regular cashback/miles through several of the portals. […]
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