45 skymiles per dollar spent at FTD.com
 

First sign up for the 50% bonus:
https://www.delta.com/marketing/holidaybonus/index.jsp

Use the 30 miles per $1 spent link on this page:
http://www.delta.com/skymiles/ways_t...iles/index.jsp

If you value miles at $0.01 per mile, for every $100 spent this would return $45 worth of miles, where as bing.com returns $25 for every $100 spent after 60 days. Not too bad if you plan on sending flowers.

Wow thank you, this is an excellent deal especially as I have to send someone flowers next week.

how to make a quick buck
buy the teddy bears, but call in to have them combined to save on shipping. They will fetch for 70-80% value on ebay. Another way to make a lot of miles for cheap. : )

The US Airways holiday shopping promo offers up to 250% bonus which boosts FTD to 70 miles per dollar.

You need 5 separate transactions with unique qualifying merchants to hit the 250% bonus level on all of your first 10 shopping transactions.

Folks are using this offer to buy miles @ 7/10ths of a penny apiece -- hit the 250% threshold and then use TrackItBack (normally 40 miles per dollar, 140 with this promo) purchases.

There are a few downsides to this, one is that I've read that you may not get these "bonus" miles until mid-march, compared to mid-february with this. Also, I've read that those 5 separate purchases may post at different dates, so you would need to make sure your 6th and largest purchase a minimum of a week or two after your 5th. Also, the value of US Air miles, I'm not sure how it compares to Delta, but I did see that I could find a roundtrip to London first class for 100,000 Delta Skymiles vs 160,000 US Air miles.

But it's a great deal if you want to rack up a lot of US Air miles, and the FTD deal is good if you are going to buy flowers. I would question that one could really sell those bears for 70-80% on ebay. I haven't seen these bears sell for more than $10 on ebay.

can't combine multiple orders to one S&H charge
 

Have you done this successfully?


The shipping is a major profit center for them.
Obviously the have bulk highly discounted shipping rates from U.P.S., Fed EX.
FTD charges more than retail shipping because it is shipping and "handling".


Moreover you don't get miles on the S & H portion.

I strongly pondered this with the US AIR "everything counts" promo a year or two ago, because it came with CHAIRMAN elite staus along with miles.
They would not budge on S & H.

My aborted plan was to buy spafinder gift certs. But I figured could you imagine my family and clients using the Cert every time they got a facial?, they would have been treated like a second class citizen! Spas want cash, They reluctantly participate in these programs in the hope of getting new REPEAT customers who will pay cash. Perhaps SPA finder pays 20-25 cent on the dollar.

Anyway sorry for my digression. But I thought long and hard about the "everything Counts U..S. Air promo, I think two years ago also in December.

SO getting back to this, You can send really poor quality flowers, that are grossly overpriced-- you pay indirectly for the miles-- and with poor service. Don't count on date specific deliveries.

You can be mile hungry or send a better quality classy gift to your desired recipient , they choice is yours. You are a second class gift sender sending second class gifts.

I value Delta miles at 50 basis points as my desired redemptions would be premium cabin international. This is impossible at low or mid. Only High.
so 100,000 miles are worth $500 to me. I will not touch that program.

Now I suppose if someones redemption pattern was for an expensive domestic coach award where delta was semi monopolistic and the lowest available fare was really high and they needed to fly that route then this might make sense.

But I am in NYC and I refuse to change planes when Non stops are available.
I am flying CO on a route non stop where I have no status on a heavily discounted domestic non refundable First class fare. I could have flown AA with a connection , no thanks.

I agree that the quality of flowers are up and down. They just send the orders to local flower stores, so most of the time what is sent is nothing like the photo. The worst part is that send you are sending them to someone that lives a good distance away there is no way to check to make sure they got what you paid for.

If you use the NWA website or call to book your tickets you can easily find first class/business international for 100,000.

We can agree to disagree;)

I think they will give you 25 AA miles per dollar, which are more valuable than 50 DL miles, the Zimbabwe dollars of the sky. US miles are probably the second least valuable miles.

Hmm, need some activity in the next few months, this might be the ticket.

I checked the AA website today and I saw 10 miles per dollar. Even though I'm trying to make 1MM on AA, I went with the DL promotion.

Agree on DL, strongly, vehemently disagree on US. You can redeem US miles on almost every Star Alliance carrier, and for significantly less miles than is required by UA/CO/etc., especially if you book before January 6th when the new US redemption charts go into effect.

A couple random thoughts:

(1) Someone was earlier quoting F rates to LON ranging from 100k to 160k. Are those both for a 3-cabin F service? The 100k award sounds like a two-cabin F or a three-cabin C/J award. I don't fly Skyteam so I could be wrong. If DL or AF or whomever is doing three-cabin F to Europe for 100k, then those are not the Zimbabwean dollars of the sky.

(2) US has some sweet spots in their program - for one, they don't Starnet block and two, they have slightly different country/region definitions, making some awards very attractive using US miles. On the flip side, they charge more garbage fees on *A awards. I have about 100k with them...I guess I should go figure out what the January 6th changes entail.

(3) My biggest problem with FTD is that you don't earn miles on the bogus delivery charge. So all of these "45 miles per dollar" purchases are going to skew downward. On one hand, I hate paying $70 for flowers that have a street value of about $20, but OTOH for 30-40 miles per dollar I will occasionally do it. On the bright side: the miles post reliably and quickly. I don't have the time or energy to mess with "mileage mall" promotions unless there's a seriously large carrot at the end of the stick.

(4) If you just need activity to prevent expiration of miles, do a cheap iDine or redeem 500 miles for a magazine subscription. Don't blow $70 on mediocre-quality flowers unless you (a) actually want to send the flowers and (b) are getting a large chunk of your total value back in miles that you'll really use.

I believe it's just a two cabin service, coach and biz. But 100k for first class to europe is a pretty good deal in my eyes.

100k for F to Europe is an exceptional deal if you can get it! ^ Seems like most programs are moving in the general direction of 150k for a true F award. :(