- Day 1 – What’s Travel Hacking all about?
- Day 2 – Getting Organized
- Day 3 – Types of Miles and Points
- Day 4 – Credit Card Strategy
- Day 5 – Southwest Companion Pass
- Day 6 – Business Credit Cards
- Day 7 – Hotel Free Night Sign-Up Bonuses & Annual Certificates
- Day 8 – How to Apply & Track
- Day 9 – Not Instantly Approved
- Day 10 – Meeting the Spending Requirement
- Day 11 – Cancel or Keep?
- Day 12 – Keep Miles from Expiring
- Day 13 – Shopping Portals
In the last lesson we learned about double dipping miles and points for online purchases with shopping portals. But what if you can’t really wait to go home and make a purchase online or the item you want to buy isn’t available online? There’s an app for that – United’s MileagePlus X app. Let me show you how it works.
United MileagePlus X
Head over to the app store and download MileagePlus X app. It will look like this:
This app links to your United Mileage frequent flier account. So you will have to set one up if you don’t already have one. Your login/password will be the same. Also your credit cards saved to your United account will be used in this app also. Once logged in, your screen will look like this:
The app automatically lists the nearby stores that participate so you don’t have to do a lot of searching. Say you are at Red Robin for lunch and the bill arrives, simply click on the ‘Pay now’ button under Red Robin to earn 5 United miles per dollar spent at Red Robin like this:
The nice thing is that you can put the exact value of your meal down to the cent. After clicking on the ‘Pay now’ button the app will ask you for your United Mileage password to confirm your identity and then it will process the transaction and provide you with an electronic gift card that you will use to pay for your meal.
I was on a recent weekend shopping trip with my wife and I test it out at two merchants. First we were at Lowe’s buying plants and flowers. Our cart started to fill up and I knew that we had more than $20 worth of items, so I went into the app and bought a $20 gift card to see how long it would take process and provide an electronic gift card. I did this while my wife was still looking, I didn’t want to get to the front of the line and wait for our full total amount and have the app take a couple minutes to process while there was a long line of people.
Thankfully the app only took a few seconds to process the transaction. We got in line and our total ended up being a little over $40. I showed my phone screen to the cashier and he scanned the barcode of the electronic gift card and my total was brought down by $20. I payed the rest with a credit card.
Our next stop on the shopping trip was to Marshalls. Confident that the transaction would processes quickly, I waited until we checked out and had our full amount of $61.03 before making the MileagePlus X purchase. Again, after hitting the ‘Pay now’ button and typing in my password, the electronic gift card with a scannable bar code showed up in a few seconds. The cashier simply scanned my phone screen and the payment was completed. The receipt printed out and showed the balance of my gift card was $0.
The only downside that I have come across is that you are buying a gift card to be used at the store/restaurant. Therefore if you return and item that you don’t want, you won’t get cash back or a credit on your credit card – you will get back a gift card. If you shop at the store a lot than this is probably not a big deal for you.
If you think you may return an item, you can always purchase a gift card in a smaller amount than the total like I did in the Lowe’s example above, then if you return an item since you partially paid in cash/credit you will be able to get it back in cash/credit card.
Also, there are some online merchants listed in the app also. You can always check to see if MileagePlus X has a higher payout than a shopping portal. As you can see above, I rarely find Amazon.com on shopping portals so I end up using MileagePlus X app for Amazon gift cards.
So just like shopping portals, MileagePlus X app usually won’t earn you a huge amount of miles, but you can build up your United Mileage account balance pretty quickly if you remember to use this app when you are out shopping. I really need to move this app to my front page so I remember to use it more.
Need to Knows
- Use the United MileagePlus X app to earn additional United miles when out dining and shopping
- Since you are buying a gift card to be used at the business through the United MileagePlus X app, if you need to return an item you will receive your refund on a gift card
