[iolaire]

I don’t really know where to stick this – so I’m sticking it in Daily Chuckle as sad but funny. (feel free to move it)

I frequent two travel message boards with a focus towards earning miles and flying. Recently there have been a few too good to be true offers at airline shopping malls, people jumped on the deals expecting to earn outrageous numbers of miles, and now that they know that they are not going to get them they are completely outraged. People are so worked up that I would not be surprised if some lawsuits are generated and more than a few small claims court claims come up.

There were two sets of offers:
1. Purchase anything (such as a $5 sticker) from the Verizon store via AA Shopping and get 89,000 miles (it takes 67,500 to fly from the US to say Thailand via Hong Kong on Cathay Pacific)
a. Here is the flyertalk.com thread on this offer – all 2,500+ posts - AA Miles for $0.00072 per mile (AA Shopping) - NOT HONORED - FlyerTalk Forums
b. Here is a similar thread on the newer MilePoint.com site – only 350 posts here - AA Miles for $0.00072 per mile (AA Shopping) - NOT HONORED - FlyerTalk Forums

2. Make any purchase from a web host EasyCGI and receive seeming like 5,000 miles – so people ordered the hosting say $150/month, then started ordering 1 gig storage upgrades one off maybe a few dollars
a. Here is a tread on this deal on MilePoint.com - Call for help: US Airways Mileage Mall offer w/ EasyCGI | milepoint

I’m a believer that the loyalty site terms and conditions protect them legally but they still can be harmed by this ill will – the terms say they don’t need to pay the miles for any reason...

So if you offer any sort of loyalty program you might think about your risks when you see people get so worked up like this. I also think there are a few of you who view the loyalty programs fairly negatively, so I thought you would be interested in this.

There also seems to be a lot of confusion – thinking that the airlines actually participate in selecting offers to feature, and that someone made a choice to offer 89,000 miles per purchase! I believe is this is data feed issues, and maybe also some sort of automated parsing of the vendor’s affiliate terms and conditions.

[iolaire]

Also to help people understand the miles shopping sites work I created this thread over on mile point How Mile/Points Shopping Portals Work (as I see it) | milepoint

If anyone has any corrections please feel free to PM me here. Most of the posts is based off of random ideas I've gleamed from this site over the years.

[Chuck Hamrick]

Thanks iolaire, moved to Unethical Merchants forum so others can be alerted.