Happy Valentine’s Day!

Surely this is one of the flower industry’s biggest days in terms of sales. If you are planning to send flowers to someone to celebrate Cupid today, don’t forget to maximize your airline miles or hotel points with the easy steps below. I was able to earn 30 miles for every dollar I spent on flowers this week. Here’s how:

Step 1: Check a Shopping Rewards Search Engine

Before you even start looking at flowers for that special someone, check out a site like www.evreward.com. This site, and others like it, list the best miles/points bonuses out there for various stores.

Once you arrive a the home page, click on the “Browse” tab in the Upper Right corner:

Then click on the “Flowers and Gifts” Category on the left hand side.

From here you can browse for offers at various retailers and see what is being offered. Some retailers offer bigger rebates than others.

I clicked on 1-800-Flowers and noticed that United was offering 30 miles for every $1 spent! Since I had an American Express Offer for $15 back after spending $50 or more with 1-800-Flowers and I could always use more United Miles, I decided that I was going to use this offer.

Step 2: Go to your Airline or Hotel Shopping Portal

In this case, since I chose the offer for 30x United miles, I headed to the United Home Page and clicked on the “Earn Miles” Tab under the Mileage Plus section.

The offer was prominently displayed on the “Earn Miles” home page. But, even if it wasn’t I could have easily found it by clicking on the shopping portal and searching for flowers.

After clicking on the link, I was redirected to the 1-800-Flowers Home Page with a special United banner detailing the offer and the code to input at checkout.

Once I selected my purchase, I headed to checkout, input the code and my United Mileage Plus number and will be credited with 30 miles for every $1 of my purchase. I ended up spending about $75 on flowers so I expect to receive about 2,250 United miles in my account within a few weeks. Additionally, American Express credited me with $15 back to my SPG card so I only was out of pocket about $60. 2,250 United miles are conservatively worth about $40–which means I basically only “spent” $20 to send some beautiful flowers to my Valentine. Additionally, this counts as activity in my United Mileage Plus account, so it extends the expiration date of my miles. Purchasing anything through an airline’s shopping portal is normally a great way to extend the life of your miles by extending the expiration date.

Conclusion

Shopping portals are a great way to earn miles on purchases you would be making anyway. Especially around holidays, some retailers really increase the amount of their bonuses to attract customers. Periodically there will be promotions from the retailers and mileage programs increasing the bonus amounts to 30x, 50x, and sometimes even more.