Overview
Groupon announced today a new loyalty program whereby consumers will earn a choice of various airline miles with all your Groupon purchases. Choose one of the following 7 points currencies to earn: United Airlines, American Airlines AAdvantage, Alaska Airlines Mileage Plan, Choice Privileges, IHG Rewards Club, JetBlue’s TrueBlue Program, and La Quinta Returns.
The way it works is that you signup with a particular airline and enter their promo code at checkout. To be eligible, you need to do the initial signup to link your Groupon account to your mileage account and enter the given promo code each time at checkout.
Groupon plans to continue to add more brands to the loyalty program in the coming months as well as expand it to international customers. (I’m a little confused as to why the press release makes no mention of United.)
Earning Details
For each dollar spent on Groupon, you’ll get the following mileage earnings:
- Groupon Local gets 5 miles in airline miles or 10 miles in hotel points
- Groupon Getaways gets 4 miles in airline miles or 8 miles in hotel points
- Goods purchased on Groupon get 3 miles in airline miles or 6 miles in hotel points
There’s also the a signup bonus:
- Make a Groupon Local purchase of $30 or more and get 1,000 airline miles or 2,000 hotel miles
Be sure to make a Groupon Local purchase your first purchase after signing up; otherwise, it won’t be eligible.
Fine Print
- Points will post in 4-6 weeks of purchase.
- Cannot be stacked or combined with any other offers, sales, or promotions, including but not limited to any third party cash back and/or loyalty programs.
Since this works as a promo code, it’ll only work on items which are eligible for promo codes, plus it’ll negate your ability to use other promo codes. Further, this loyalty program won’t stack with shopping portals.
Final Thoughts
The loyalty program on it’s own sounds quite good. The major issue is the fact that you’re giving up portal rewards as well as the ability to use other promo codes.
Let’s assume you aren’t using a promo code: it’s down to using this airline loyalty program or a shopping portal. Looking at portal history, it appears that you can usually get between 6% – 10% cash back from the portal or around 3-4 miles/points. So there isn’t necessarily a gain of using this loyalty program over the shopping portals we’ve used until now.
The program will be more valuable if it does, in fact, stack with shopping portals, despite the terms. Regardless, some people might prefer taking advantage of the loyalty program instead, depending which point currencies you value most.
Hat tip to Frequentmiler
