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
I’m an idiot. I made the purchase and forgot to put in the code. Oh well. At least the groupon I bought is to a local restaurant that I do really enjoy.
Not loving groupon today.
Got a message that I changed my password….I didn’t.
Got another message, I could not buy some travel deal or something….I didn’t buy anything, my account was somehow compromised.
I emailed them (they have no phone CS anymore) and said very clearly I did not buy this deal, someone stole my account login. Rajesh just emailed me and said I was lucky as the ‘deal’ I wanted to buy was still available….lol and sad all at once.
Awful customer service and there are no visible ways on the site that I could find that says ‘hey, I was hacked, please lock this account up’
grrrrr
If your email address is still the same, you can reset your password again to lock it down.
Seems like only value is the “signup bonus” of 1,000 miles.
Seems like a good way to generate mile activity and prevent miles from expiring.
I’ll tell you what I value. Cold hard cash. 20% off promo codes far exceed this.
Yeah negating promo codes makes this only somewhat useful for last minute purchases when there is no promo going on. I was hoping this would apply to purchases where promos don’t work (like groupon live), but sadly not the case. Snooze.
Portals often provide better rewards than this.
20% off all local deals comes around pretty much weekly, so I can’t see myself using this over 20% off.
Good to get Alaska miles… they are actually still worth something
Concur — though your good reasoning short-circuits a *tic post to be “thrilled” at the chance to get more AA miles….. (oh wait, this could help me earn a few for each account, so they don’t expire when the next 18 months is up)
Having to input a code every time sounds like a hassle
Yeah, it’s surprising they require that. Probably just to negate other promo codes from working, and so that you can choose whether you want to use the loyalty program or a different promo code.
Yup, I wish they just prefilled it though and you could replace with another promo code.