If you have been looking for a way to give back but may not want to give away your hard earned cash, especially for anyone who is tight on money, there is an opportunity with Air Miles.
Earning rewards can be used on yourself, but they can also be a currency to use to donate to give back.
Air Miles announced that Air Miles Gold and Onyx members will receive an extension on their elite status. Furthermore, there is an extension the waiver period for travel change fees.
You may have received an email from Air Miles that looks like this:
Air Miles announced its commitment to support two leading Canadian charities, Kids Help Phone and Food Banks Canada, by providing a channel for its collectors to donate their miles.
Below are the highlights of the donation initiative:
Effective today, March 31, 2020, Air Miles collectors can use their Cash Miles to redeem for Uber Eats and Door Dash eVouchers. The redemption rate is 190 Cash Miles for a $20 eVoucher code. This is pretty much the benchmark rate of return I would suggest for Air Miles redemptions. You are getting 10.5 cents per miles ($20 / 190 points). In other words, you are ahead of the game if you can get more than 11 cents per mile in value, but you do not want to dip below 10 cents per mile if you want to optimize your miles.
Loyalty programs across the board have implemented temporary solutions to deal with any COVID-19 related matters. Below is a list of hyperlinks to useful information. I also included a small blurb for each company that may be more commonly relevant.
I tried to include companies more relevant to Canadians, but please let us know in the comment section below if you see any other links that we can add to the list (in alphabetical order).
AIR MILES is expanding its partnership with Samsung Canada. You can now earn miles on Samsung mobile technology, including the new Samsung Galaxy S20 5G series. This is an addition to the existing method of earning miles through the Samsung Pay app and on Samsung products through the Air Miles merchandise catalogue
You now earn 1 mile for every $20 spent on mobile devices including smartphones, tablets, wearables and accessories purchased online.
AIR MILES is doing a Flight-A-Day Giveaway. Below are the details of the contest.
Prize Details
There are two primary prizes that you can win:
1 of 30 $5,000 daily flight voucher prizes
Grand Prize of $25,000 flight voucher
There is a limit of 1 daily flight prize per member, but the good news is that winning one of the 30 winners of flight prizes will still allow you to win the Grand Prize.
Quite a few changes were made to the American Express Air Miles Reserve Card and BMO Air Miles World Elite MasterCard since I wrote the comparison post, so I thought I’d give a proper update to both cards at the same time. But this time, I added the American Express Platinum Credit Card into the mix as improvements to the card made it a more viable option.
It is no secret that Air Miles has been quite unpopular lately, due to their continued devaluation of reward redemptions and no increase in earning ratios (neither with its credit cards cobranded cards, nor with its partners). That being said, they do have a valuable partnership with LCBO, Ontario’s liquor store. One devaluation that has no occurred (I’m assuming “yet”) is the cash miles options, where you can redeem 95 Air Miles for $10 towards your next LCBO purchase. They now made it easier to redeem the $10 voucher with its new eVoucher option.
UPDATE [April 30, 2019 8:15pm EST]- Please note that some information has been updated in the responses below from when it was posted earlier today [April 30, 2019 9:20am EST]. Today we have the pleasure of interviewing Blair Cameron, President of AIR MILES who is going to share some exciting news about airmilesshops.ca, its partnership with redtag.ca and other titbits. Thank you for taking the time to answer our questions Mr. Cameron. Q1: Please tell us about yourself.Hello, I am Blair Cameron, President of the AIR MILES Reward Program, Canada’s most recognized loyalty Program.