Pretty much every month, airline shopping portals run by Cartera launch a promotion offering bonus miles. Sometimes that’s 1,000 bonus miles when installing their browser button and using it to spend $25, while other times it’ll be a spending offer like ‘Spend $1,000 & earn 4,000 bonus miles.’
With some airline portals, those additional bonus miles aren’t elite qualifying, but there’s good news on the Mileage Plan front – bonus miles earned from promotions through the Alaska Airlines shopping portal do earn EQMs.
With the American Airlines shopping portal, let’s say you make a $500 purchase at a retailer offering 4x miles and that there’s simultaneously a promotion offering 1,000 bonus miles when spending $500. You’d earn a total of 3,000 AAdvantage miles ($500 * 4 + 1,000), but you’d only earn 2,000 Loyalty Points as the 1,000 bonus miles aren’t Loyalty Point-eligible.
The Alaska Airlines portal on the other hand is more generous. In an identical scenario, you’d earn 3,000 Mileage Plan miles, but you’d also earn 1,000 Elite Qualifying Miles (EQMs). That’s because for every 3,000 miles earned through Alaska spending partners (such as the portal), you earn 1,000 EQMs.
When Alaska Airlines revamped its loyalty program at the start of this year, there had been the expectation that bonus miles earned during portal promotions wouldn’t be elite qualifying based on how it works with American Airlines and Southwest. However, after reaching out to Alaska Airlines, they’ve confirmed that those bonus miles will count towards EQMs earnings.
For the last few years, it’s been possible to earn 6,000-8,000 bonus miles each year from the Alaska shopping portal when they run these limited time spending promotions (excluding the browser button offers). If that continues this year and in future years, that’s an additional 2,000 EQMs up for grabs each year towards status.
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[…] Frequent Miler notes that Alaska MileagePlan Shopping awards elite qualifying miles on both regular spend and on portal bonuses, so prepare for a swole rank of 100k MVPs in 2026. […]
Can you ask them to clarify if this will stack with the double EQM earning on non-airline partners that’s available as a 10K milestone? Could be a great play with Bilt payments. I tried to get an answer but they told me I need to wait and find out some time in the spring. Kind of hard to get excited about the program now while they’re still withholding the details.
Just to check, are you referring to the 3x Alaska miles you can earn using an Alaska card to make rent payments with Bilt rather than just regular transfers from Bilt to Alaska?
Actually, I just found the answer to your question in their terms & conditions. Under the Perks section it says (my bolding):
2X miles with non-air partners: If you select this benefit, you will receive double Mileage Plan® Miles (up to 2,000) for all qualifying non-airline transactions in the hotel, cruise, car rental, ride share, and everyday categories for 6 months, beginning on the date the benefit is selected. Miles earned through the Alaska Airlines Visa card or transfer partners (including Bilt, hotel partner transfers, and other financial partners) are not eligible for double miles. Purchased, gifted, or transferred Miles are not eligible for double miles. Bonus Miles are not elite qualifying miles and do not count toward future elite status qualification.
Seeing as miles earned through the Alaska Visa card aren’t eligible, it doesn’t seem like you’d be able to double the 3x you’d earn on Bilt payments. However, it would double the EQMs earned from the shopping portal, but only up to 2k EQMs.
Thank you for running this down! That’s a reasonable interpretation of how they’ll calculate 2X miles with non-air partners. I can read it a little differently, too. It looks like they’re saying you won’t earn double miles by transferring from Bilt to Alaska. I’m also confused by the reference to Bonus Miles at the end of this paragraph (none of these earnings are defined as Bonus Miles).
Oh, you’re right – I misread that. The 2k miles are redeemable miles, not EQMs.
I wish this post happened while the bonus was still ongoing 🙂
I’ll trybto remember for next time
Yep, we’d asked Alaska about this a couple of weeks ago when the promo was on, but only received a reply yesterday. The good thing is that there’s usually a new promo every month or every other month.
I was hoping for this to be the case and speculatively did enough shopping to qualify for the New Year bonus. Every little bit counts, and a few thousand EQMs can substitute for a bunch of short west coast trips.
I get the point that bonus miles count towards Alaska EQMs, but based onyour scenario, isn’t AA shopping portal still a better option to collect EQM/loyalty points? What’s the catch? 🙂
It depends on if you’re trying to earn status with Alaska Airlines or American Airlines. The purpose of this post though was to highlight that when the Alaska shopping portal runs limited time promotions offering x bonus miles for $x spend, those bonus miles count for EQMs. With the American shopping portal, those bonus miles don’t earn an equivalent number of Loyalty Points.
But, it is worth noting that AA’s portal tends to have higher multiples than Alaska’s portal.
Aren’t Alaska miles earned through shopping portals divided by a factor of 3. So, 3000 miles through shopping portals equals 1000 EQMs, irrespective of bonus or not.
Yes, 3,000 miles = 1,000 EQMs. What we hadn’t known until now though was that the bonus miles earned from limited time spending promotions also count, because they don’t count on the American Airlines or Southwest portals.