Airline shopping portals, explained

An airline shopping portal is a directory of online stores you click through before you buy, which then pays you miles for the purchase. The major US airlines all run one, and for many people it's an easy way to earn miles from shopping they were going to do anyway. This guide covers what they are, how to read their rates, and the one thing almost nobody tells you: a lot of them are the same store underneath.

What is an airline shopping portal?

It's an affiliate storefront wearing an airline's colors: a shop window that earns a cut for sending you somewhere else to buy. The airline (really, a partner that runs the portal for them) has that arrangement with a large network of stores. When you start at the portal, click through to a store, and buy, the store pays the portal a commission, the portal's cut for sending the customer, and the portal hands you part of that back as miles in your frequent-flyer account instead of cash. Any term here you haven't met before is in the glossary.

You're not getting a discount; you're getting miles funded by the store's marketing budget, on top of everything else you'd normally earn.

Why is the rate in miles per dollar, not a percentage?

Cashback sites quote a percentage because they pay you cash. Airline portals pay in their program's currency, so they quote a rate per dollar instead. Some quote miles per dollar - 2 mi/$, 4 mi/$, sometimes more - and others, such as Alaska, Southwest and JetBlue, quote points per dollar in their own program's points. A store showing 4 mi/$ pays four miles for every eligible dollar you spend, so a $100 order earns about 400 miles. Eligibility is set by the portal's terms, and many exclude gift cards or very large orders, so check them before you count on the full amount. There's no percentage to translate.

Whether that's a good deal depends entirely on what a mile is worth to you, and that's a personal number - a Southwest point and an Emirates mile are not the same thing, and neither is worth a fixed cent. We never quietly convert miles to dollars for you; when we show a cents-per-point assumption anywhere on the site, it's a number you set yourself on your account's Point values page, not a fact.

Here's one store's rates at the airline portals that quote miles per dollar, live:

The part nobody mentions: a few platforms, a lot of logos

Click through United's portal (MileagePlus Shopping), then American's (AAdvantage eShopping), then Delta's (SkyMiles Shopping). The layout and store list feel familiar for a reason. Those three, plus Southwest and Alaska, all run on one shared white-label platform: one company builds the storefront, and each airline licenses it, paints it their color, and plugs in their own miles or points.

The version of this you usually hear is that every airline portal runs on that one platform. It doesn't, and the difference matters. Of the airline portals we track, a second group runs on a different shared platform: JetBlue, plus international programs like Flying Blue, Emirates Skywards, Asia Miles and Virgin Atlantic. One more runs on a platform of its own: Aeroplan's eStore.

So what's actually running underneath is a handful of shared platforms, not one, and that has two real consequences:

• Portals built on the same platform often carry almost the same list of stores, but not always. On the platform behind United, American, Delta, Southwest and Alaska, the lists are nearly identical: if a store is on United's portal, it's very likely on American's and Delta's too, because all three are reading from one catalog. The second platform is less uniform: JetBlue, Emirates and Virgin Atlantic overlap heavily, but Flying Blue and Asia Miles carry far fewer stores. Across platforms, a store you found on United, American or Delta may or may not be on JetBlue's or Flying Blue's.
• The rates and the miles still differ. Same platform does not mean same numbers. Each airline sets its own rate for each store and pays in its own currency. The question that matters is "which portal pays the most miles I actually value today?" - and that changes store by store, day by day.

Because we track 44 portals in one place, you don't have to open a dozen tabs to answer that. Across the major airline portals, here's how one store's rate has moved lately:

Miles or cash? A quick way to decide

For any given purchase you can usually earn either miles (through an airline portal) or cash (through a cashback portal). A rough way to choose:

• Take the cash when you don't have a near-term use for the miles, or when the cash rate is clearly generous. Cash is flexible. Cashback rates still move, though, and can drop back the day a promo ends, so check the rate on the day you buy.
• Take the miles when you're saving toward a specific award and expect to get more value from them than the cash for the same purchase would give you. Remember that an airline can devalue its miles at any time, meaning it quietly raises the number of miles an award costs, and cash can't be repriced that way.

There's no universal winner. That's exactly why we show both as they are paid, miles as miles and points as points, never silently converted into dollars, and let you judge. If you want the mechanics of how cashback tracking works before you rely on it, read when cashback doesn't track; if portals are new to you, start with cashback portals 101. The shorter blog version of this platform story, with the same map, is Do airline shopping portals share the same platform?