Back to School (Portal) Shopping

United’s back-to-school portal deal.

Tl;dr: Quickly boost your mileage balance with these shopping portal bonuses. 

A while back I wrote about shopping portals, a simple way to boost your rewards on online purchases simply by clicking through the portal or activating a browser extension before checkout. I just picked up another big bag of points a couple weeks ago when I booked a hotel stay, but, sadly, my timing was just a bit off. As I mentioned in that post, these portals are prone to run promotions, and I just missed the airlines’ back-to-school promotions.

As Daily Drop catalogs here, American, Alaska, Delta, Southwest, and United are all offering small-but-solid incentives if you use their portals to make purchases over the next few days (although back-to-school is the theme, any purchase qualifies). If you are focusing on a particular airline, then that will be the one to focus on (note that the promotions end on varying days, with Delta’s ending earliest, on the 10th). But if you’re more of a free agent, then United’s deal is the best, offering 500 miles after spending $150 on purchases through the portal. That’s on top of the earnings from the purchases themselves. So, for example, if you spent $150 on clothes at Under Armour and Adidas, for example, you would get 950 miles: 3x miles per dollar spent plus the 500 miles bonus. United miles are particularly handy if you have a card whose points can be transferred to United, like the Bilt card or a Chase Sapphire.

Obviously, this will only be worthwhile if this is spending you would have done anyway, and it would still be worthwhile to check Cashback Monitor to make sure you’re getting the best deal. But if you’re planning a decent-sized purchase, this is a good offer to be aware of.