Update 3/27/14: From March 24, 1014 – April 10, 2014 you will earn 500 miles if you visit one of the participating locations.
Recently I got an email from US Air letting me know that my dividend miles were going to expire if I didn’t have any account activity by a certain date. This made me look into the options of not losing them since I have close to 20,000. What I found was pretty interesting and something you probably want to take advantage of.
You can of course use your miles for magazines like Travel and Leisure and Food and Wine or you can pay a $9 one-time fee to extend the expiration date out another 18 months from the last account activity. The fee was new to me and was good to know, but after talking to a representative I also learned they have a free dividend miles dining program.
Here is how it works.
So I signed up and added all my personal and business credit cards. All I needed to do then was to dine somewhere that was on their list of partners before my miles were to expire. Doing a query on their website for restaurants within my zip code resulted in 68 places. Surprisingly many of those were restaurants that I would go to anyways or that I frequent.
The interesting thing though is now that I’m enrolled I could actively seek out these places to gain 3 miles for every dollar I spend, but I can also be in any town, city, state and visit a place that is one the list and not even know they are part of the program, but still get the reward miles. This is clearly a win for me, but the restaurant participating is still paying US Air 10% to be part of the program. The goal of a program like this is customer acquisition or getting someone to dine with you that otherwise might not have, but if I can just go eat somewhere and by chance you are on the program, I didn’t come there because of the program, but you are still paying 10% of my bill to US Air. You do the math. Doesn’t seem to make sense for the restaurant, but hey I’m not complaining. I’ll take those miles all day every day.
The best part is this keeps your account active therefore not putting you in jeopardy of forfeiting your miles if you forget to pay the $9 fee.
So go sign up, add your cards, eat and earn some miles.
how far out does it extend your miles expiration when you use the us air dining program?
Good question. It’s 18 months. I’ve updated the post.
A super fast way to earn miles for me is booking hotel nights through rocket miles. At least 1000 miles per night up to 5000 miles per night, most are 2000-3000 per night. I book hotels not only for myself but anyone I know that is planning on staying in a hotel in the future. Rates are competitive with any other online booking site, usually a few bucks more a night but it is well worth the large quantity of miles. Check it out, I think you get free miles just for signing up, and I rarely get emails from them, if I do it’s usually worth looking at.
http://bit.ly/1rIOYyo