Airline miles

Nearly every US airline runs a shopping portal: a directory of online stores you click through before you buy, which then pays you miles for the purchase instead of cash. If you collect miles, these are some of the easiest ones you will ever earn, because the shopping is shopping you were doing anyway.

Airline portals read differently from cashback portals, and that difference is most of what this topic covers. Their rates come as miles per dollar rather than a percentage, so 3 miles per dollar and 3% are not comparable until you decide what a mile is worth to you. They move their rates harder and more often than cashback portals do. And a lot of them are the same store underneath: several airlines run their portals on the same shared software, which is why the layout, the categories and sometimes the promotions look familiar as you move between them.

Same software does not mean same rates, though. Two airlines running the identical setup routinely pay different amounts for the same store on the same day, so there is no shortcut around checking.

The posts here cover how to read a miles-per-dollar rate, when miles beat cashback and when they clearly do not, and whether a particular airline portal earns the click. Any figure we put on a mile is an estimate you can adjust, never a fact.