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The Levellers sang What A Beautiful Day. U2 sang It’s A Beautiful Day. Right now I’m singing about it being a beautiful day as Giftcards.com is once again back on airline shopping portals.
The Deal
- Earn points/miles when shopping at Giftcards.com via airline shopping portals.
Key Terms
- Expires – hopefully never!
Quick Thoughts
For the longest time Giftcards.com was available on airline shopping portals. That made it a great option whenever these portals offered bonus points/miles when spending a certain amount as it was an easy way to earn those bonuses. For example, let’s say the Alaska Airlines shopping portal offered 2,000 bonus miles when spending $500. You could buy $500 worth of gift cards (including Visa and Mastercard gift cards) from Giftcards.com to earn the 2,000 bonus miles in addition to the standard earnings through the portal.
When American Airlines revamped its AAdvantage loyalty program a couple of years ago, they announced that miles earned through its shopping portal would also earn Loyalty Points towards status. The bonus points from the aforementioned promos wouldn’t earn Loyalty Points, but your base earnings would earn an equivalent number of Loyalty Points as redeemable miles.
That made Giftcards.com a very popular option for people trying to earn status with AA, particularly because Giftcards.com was often paying out at 3x through the portal. That meant that a $1,000 order would earn both 3,000 AAdvantage miles and 3,000 Loyalty Points.
Unfortunately Giftcards.com was removed from airline shopping portals towards the end of 2022, although it was still on cashback shopping portals. I’m not sure if that change was driven via the affiliate network for Giftcards.com or if it was initiated by Cartera (the company that runs most airline shopping portals), but the reversal of that change is to be welcomed.
Even better, at the time of publishing this post all the airline portals are offering double points/miles on Giftcards.com purchases. Alaska, United, Southwest and Delta are all offering 2x, but more importantly for many people will be American Airlines which is once again at 3x.
Not only that, but Giftcards.com launched a new sale today offering $10 off when buying $100 virtual Visa gift cards. Earning 3x AAdvantage miles and Loyalty Points on those purchases will make this deal even better and should speed up many people’s quest to earn a higher level of status with American Airlines.
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@King and others. With the current Citi AAdvantage Executive Card offer, there is another play that could make this even the fees for the visa cards very worthwhile– especially if you are interested in earning Loyalty Points for status with AA. Card itself is offering 100k AA after you spend 10k. add the extra point for spending and you are getting 14 points AA and 4 loyalty points. Now since it’s 90 days, you can only spend 2k or 6k in total at this rate and of course that helps you meet 6k towards 10k spending requirement and then of course you get the additional 10k loyalty points after you acquire 50k Loyalty points and another 10k after 90k. Seems pretty good to me! Anyone know of any issues with Citi re. purchase of gift cards towards SUB spend?
AA portal now officially shows EOS10OFF code.
8 cards – 240$ each , 1920 + 8*6(fees) 48$ + 8$ shipping+ 4$ MO fee
So for 1920$ (1 order) we spend 60$ in cost and get 5760 AA .Doesn’t look like a great deal
Credit card rewards is the one which should offset this 60$ fees.
So which cards r u guys using to get that 60$ back?
I am not buying any fee cards — buying cards I would be using for normal spend anyway — xbox, a little door dash, instacart, Netflix, etc. I use biz blue for 2x reward on purchase and then AA gives us 3x — so its a 5x deal but in fairness most of those categories I list below are 3x to 4x already — so what am I getting? (a) minimum of 1X more than I would get on gold or CSP, (b) change the composition of award to AA versus xferable currency, which is valuable to me because AA points generally harder to acquire and im a big AA point spender.
People are excited, not for regular spend giftcards. They are talking about spending 30k on vgc to get 90k points . Spend 900$ to get 90k points plus loyalty status.
So my question is which card we can use to get those 900$ fees back apart from a 2% card
Xbox , door dash and all should be bought with minimum 10% discount from other venues
Giftcards.com also sells virtual Visa gift cards, so if you can liquidate those easily it means there’s no shipping fee and no MO fees, so that reduces the overall fees. For people who are looking to earn American Airlines elite status, earning an equivalent number of Loyalty Points as redeemable AAdvantage miles – as well as whatever earnings you’re getting from your credit card – can make that more worthwhile.
A more notable element with this is that Giftcards.com often runs promotions where they offer discounts on Visa gift cards. For example, right now you can get $10 off $100 virtual Visa gift cards. That’s a profitable deal even before accounting for credit card and portal earnings.
Shipping and Mo are just 12$ , whereas fees is like 48$.
So is there a trick to liquidate these Virtual cards?
I miss percent card , is there anything like that in the current market?
Will curve accept these cards?
can you buy physical gift cards on other sites with these virtual ones?
Understood but not sure you need big spend to get value – 5x is good and not even factoring in routine discounts for the cards. AA miles are valuable as part of that 5x that you can’t get everywhere. I get it that you may want to “buy” EXP too with a big pop on these cards but you can get value in the routine/boring too on cards with no fees, and no headache. Not your use case but is the use case of many.
Anyone else unable to sign in to giftcards.com? Whenever I go to checkout and click sign in the site is unable to load, no matter which browser I use
It was due to being in EU, use VPN if anyone else is having this issue
Such a sweet deal? Crazy just got $600 of Visa debit for $575 and change. How does everyone manage to spend these smaller Visa amounts of $100 each? I find it easy to use them on Amazon as Amazon automatically handles the transition to another card on file when the funds on a card are depleted. Are there other online vendors that work as seamlessly?
Actually, I’m not sure Amazon auto-transitions to another card. I remember now, I first added the amount on the card to my Amazon Gift account balance and they does the auto-transition to other cards on file when needed. Nice to get free cash and 3x AA points. Thank you frequentmiler!
I second the plan of loading them to the Amazon gift card balance for it to be seamless.
Agreed. Amazon is seamless. Even with physical visa gift cards, I prefer to load them to my Amazon gift card balance. It avoids having to monitor a card’s balance versus your next charge. It would be a pain to get denied for lack of funds when your balance estimate is off. I checked with Best Buy but they don’t seem to have a similar reload feature for your Best Buy account.
Besides, you could always use your Amazon gift card balance to later purchase Best Buy or other types of gift cards if desired. Seems like the most flexible and seamless route 🙂
Not sure about other big retailer gift cards (e.g. target/walmart) but I may have done Target with no problems in the past.
Tried to place order. Kept getting “We had to cancel your order #XXXX because it didn’t pass our screening process. Online security is important—like really important—so we take every measure we can to protect the people shopping with us.” Any ideas on how to fix?
Try using a different email address using guest checkout
I’m on the AA Simply Miles portal and they’re not showing giftcards.com (at least for me).
It’s the shopping portal rather than SimplyMiles.https://www.aadvantageeshopping.com/me____.htm?keywords=Giftcards.com&gmid=5604
Got it, Thanks. i didn’t realize there were two similar portals.
Simplymiles isn’t really a portal it’s more of a merchant reward program tied to your registered Mastercards so it will give you AA miles automatically with purchases at those merchants when you register their deals however some of the deals require you to go through that specific link on Simplymiles but for those that don’t, you can stack it with airline portals. So say you register for 2x per $1 at Macy’s or something and then go shop at the AA portal for 3x for Macy’s you’ll get both when you use a registered card.
What a welcome post. Can someone please elaborate – which is the safest credit card for this? I guess Chase is Ok; I also have no fee American Airlines. Is it going to get me shut down? Thanks.
I don’t think there are issues with any cards. I’d try to avoid buying using an Amex where I’m working on a minimum spend for, but other than that anything should be fine.
Hey @Stephen can i buy these gift cards (say Airbnb) to meet Chase minimum spend?
Yep, I’ve not heard of any issues when doing that with Chase.
What do you do with these gift cards? Doesn’t seem there’s resale value if it’s only 3x back.
Visa and Mastercard gift cards are where it gets interesting. Giftcards.com also offers discounted gift cards at times (e.g. 10% off Uber and Lowe’s, 15% off select other brands, etc.)
Wow — ExPlat may actually be attainable now! I saw this earlier today and my order got cancelled so I may have to wait a couple of days to try again to avoid fraud warnings, but if this sticks around it’s huge.
Try using a different email address – my main email address always gets autocancelled, but a different email address with the same address and credit card inggets orders through no problem. Also try place orders using guest checkout rather than logging in.
There is a fine print term at the bottom left of the giftcards.com’s page on AAdvantageEShoppping.com website.
“Mileage terms
Please note these terms & conditions: Special terms: Orders over $2,000.00 are not eligible.This merchant is temporarily unable to reward for purchases made using the default settings for Safari 12 or higher, which automatically block the cookies required for this merchant to track your purchase. This feature can be turned off in your browser settings by disabling the ‘Prevent Cross-Site Tracking’ setting. Not eligible on purchases made with coupon or discount codes that are not found on this site.”
It might mean that if you use the 10% coupon for gift cards, you simply won’t earn miles. I don’t see the 10% offer listed on AAdvantageEShopping portal.
Do you guys have any ways to check with the AA shopping portal?
Giftcards.com has only just been added back on. In the past the airline portals have carried at least one of the VGC promo codes when those offers have been run, so hopefully at least one gets added soon. Those portals tend to have their rates updated at midnight ET, so I’m hoping a code is added at that point too.
Having said that, the VGC deal was launched before Giftcards.com was added back on to these portals, so it might be that Cartera doesn’t end up listing one or more of the promo codes. If I had to guess, EOS10OFF will work as that’s listed on other shopping portals, but no guarantee on that.
Didn’t seem to track for me yet but will update as I already ordered gift cards with the 10% off code. If it works nice if not it’s just money I would have spent on car insurance anyways.
I almost never have large orders track automatically. I always have to send the order email 15 days later to force the points. Annoying and disingenuous of them.
Weird. Right after I bought some shoes and its like congrats on your 500 miles. I’m like oh so you do work swift when you want.
You we’re right. Now the discount code is visible on the AAdvantageEshopping. Happy Travels
Yea I wonder as well
Lol giftcards.com is now the most viewed store on cashbackmonitor.com (and they haven’t even updated )