eMiles has announced that it’ll be closing down on June 15, 2018. This isn’t a great loss to the world of miles and points, but if you have any eMiles collecting dust then you’ll want to transfer them ASAP.
In case you’re not familiar with eMiles, they offered an opportunity to complete tasks to earn points. These tasks ranged from watching a 30 second video to earn 5 points to earning 1,250 points for joining a wine club. They also had a limited shopping portal, but the rates were never great whenever I checked.
The points you earned could then be transferred to various travel and shopping partners (such as the ones shown above). I think they transferred on a 1:1 basis which was fairly useful, but it took forever to rack up points unless you were happy to provide all kinds of information to marketing companies in exchange for a handful of eMiles at a time.
eMiles never seemed to find its niche. It wasn’t really a survey company, it wasn’t really a shopping portal, it didn’t really offer anything other than weekly emails hawking $2 magazine subscriptions. It’s therefore no surprise that they’re closing down on June 15, 2018 which is also the last day to redeem your points.
Alternatively, you can join their sister company e-Rewards (an actual survey company) and have your eMiles transferred over. 1 eMile will be worth $0.05 in e-Rewards currency but which isn’t the same as $0.05 in real money. The final date to transfer from eMiles to e-Rewards will be June 29, 2018, after which they’ll expire. The good thing about e-Rewards is that they also offer travel partners and, if you’re willing to make the effort with completing surveys, can be a good way of racking up some free miles or hotel points, albeit in a time consuming way. However, be aware that several readers have had issues with having their e-Rewards shut down, so there’s a risk that investing a lot of time in completing their surveys could result in nothing.
Edit: eMiles will be sending out invitations to join e-Rewards by June 1, 2018.
So if you’ve ever earned any points with eMiles, be sure to transfer them to one of the partners. It’s worth doing this ASAP – I’ve been unable to log in to transfer my ~2,000 eMiles despite changing my password, so it might take a while to get problems resolved given that they likely don’t have great staffing levels now.
[…] eMiles is closing June 15. If you had enough miles for a redemption or very close to one, it may be worth it to do it NOW. I redeemed for 500 United miles in my wife’s account, the other three in the family were nowhere near. I am not surprised by this development as the site turned into a major spam operation lately. […]
How do you transfer? I dont see any such option in my eMile account that is signed up under United invite long time ago. There is no such option call Transfer, only Redeem and it is to United only at 500 a pop raised from 250 a few years ago.
Seems like my orphaned 341 miles will go to trash bin.
BTW I have not gotten an email from them.
I’m not able to access my account at the moment, so unfortunately can’t see how to transfer / redeem the points. It’s a shame if transfers can only be done in 500 mile increments as I think I was at something like 1,975 points, so I’ll presumably have ~475 orphaned points if/when I get access to my account.
also cannot log in to emiles anymore… what’s going on?
Hmmm…that makes it sound like it’s more of a widespread issue then rather than a login issue that’s only relating to my account. I emailed them last night and received an automated reply saying I should hear back within three business days.
I had forgotten my password, tried resetting it, and after resetting, still can’t log in. Perhaps if I’d logged in with my old password to begin with, it might have worked. At the very least it’s an issue with their password reset system…
i just logged in with no problems
I heard back from emiles – apparently it’s because I’m using a VPN. I disconnected it and have finally been able to log in (I did need to reset my password again though).
And how can you join ERewards right now when they aren’t currently offering open enrollment?
The email from eMiles said they’d be sending out invitations to join e-Rewards by June 1 – I’ll update the post to include that as I hadn’t realized e-Rewards doesn’t have open enrollment anymore.