Did you cancel to try and get your annual fee back.. and hoped to keep the points?

any promo involving Cartera and Freecause.

I hope I'm wrong about the UA one

I'm on the freecause shopping tool bar, any issues with not getting miles from it?

I dont have access to the links right now, but take a look at US Air and Hawaiian Airlines forums for threads involving a company called EasyCGI and Freecause from a June offering on both airlines using the FC toolbars. Neither were honored (yet) and over a hundred people are awaiting the fait of roughly 260 million miles combined. FC has been the culprit in the entire thing.

I made 1 or 2 posts on that thread. If I won, great! If not, no big deal. I visited the House of Miles that weekend paying my own expenses (air, hotel, etc) when the FT community was invited to go. Had a very nice time & got to meet some great people!

Randy selected the winner using a random number selector. Very fair IMHO.

Waste of time: Asking to fill out surveys and nothing is offered. (or a chance to win some $$ or miles ).

Also a waste of time when one has to follow up when points are offered for doing something and they deny you for a small technicality buried in the many pages of fine print.

I rather fill out credit card applications and get 50-100K bonus per application. I even help others (relatives, coworkers, friends) with the FT links for the giant bonuses. Much better use of my time. . I also "teach" them how to "fish" (read FT, Milepoint, frugaltravelguy & other blogs ).

I got a $30 check mailed to me for completing a survey. The check bounced, so after my NSF bank fee, I was $20 behind.

It's going to take a long while before those Audience Rewards trivia points add up to anything useful.

I used to participate heavily on online surveys. After 5+ years, all I have to show is 3000 UA miles, 1000 CO miles, 200 DL miles, 3000 AA miles, 4 movie tickets and $25 gift card. Not worth it at all. I used to do them during my lunch break at work, or on the weekends at home. After seeing what I've earned/redemed, there are better things to do with my time. I still participate in some, but only beacuse I'm getting close to a redemption threshold, once there I will cash in "points" and close the account once the rewards psot to my account.

The one thing I REALLY HATE of the surveys is how many times you need to enter your age, sex, state! They already have that information from my online profile. Why don't they change the question to something along the lines of "IS YOU PROFILE INFORMATION CURRENT?" and lets you pick and choose what needs to be changed, instead of going screen by screen

I think, though I'm not sure, it's because they contract it out. Which makes the firm you signed up with the first screen. The second screen is after you've been doing the survey for 20 minutes, and they don't like what you answered, and they either spit you out or say that a (more) trivial number of credits will be deposited in your account. Often without an explanation.

Now, the e-miles program, or whatever, did rescue me when HHonors advised that my account would expire in a week. It was almost like karma for all the time I'd spent years ago. So that thing about keeping accounts alive is one positive -- either proactively or in a panic.

Further to the personal information point, looking back, it's also inadequate compensation for all that they log about me. It's naive to believe the total privacy that they promise. (But, card on the table, I was one of the arch-conservatives in the threads about the "Clear" TSA transit expediting program.) Back to regular programming...

Continental Shop OnePass "twice the miles". Closer to zero the miles 2-3 months later.

They are terrible at tracking purchases. I've need to mail CO to follow up on nearly every purchase. With one exception (that I'm still fighting 6 months on) they have eventually posted all my miles.

I have begun to think it may save me frustration if I chose to just NOT use ANY shopping portal to get extra miles on online store purchases.

If I think I am GETTING something by shopping and ending up with miles, but the miles dont post, I may experience the following in that process:

1) I lose some piece of mind
2) I lose some hope of the extra reward promised to me
3) I lose some faith in a system or in such consumerism in general
4) I get frustrated
5) I have to save files and notes and wait and chase and email and call and mail and fax or waste paper printing things out which kills trees and costs more money at Staples where I buy my paper, through the airline malls.
6) I waste time in these forums
7) I believe and then feel duped and get angry that these people mess up these things and actually get paid to do so, meaning some jerk marketing president is making a killing on commissions based on rebate fraud
8) I want to find ways to game the system which many moralists do not like.
9) I have antagonists on FT coming at me for posting my thoughts
10) While the many miles from such purchases do add up and could save your acct from expiring or could bring you to an award level, it is not really worth it and I find dining to be a more solid rewards network even though it can have its own issues.

yes, I am giving up the mall thing I think.
That is, until and unless the people who run it shape up or ship out.
I mean in 2011 you would think systems and databases and computers are far enough advanced to handle this sort of thing but no! I think things went backwards and that is so very sad.

This is so true. I had never used the shopping portals before until the last few months. The fact that so many of these shopping portals are hit or miss and points often don't even show up as "pending" for several weeks, and then can take a further few months to transfer is just mind-boggling.

There's no good technical reason that once your credit card is charged and/or the item is shipped the miles can't be credited immediately. I mean 24-48 hours would be annoying but understandable, but 2-3 months? Are they sending the miles to your miles account by walking postman across the country?

I'll add my experience...depending upon what side of luck I'd wake up that particular day, I'd get pleasantly surprised (meaning aligned with my expectations of getting the miles), or shocked by seeing the Avis receipt printout the miles, when I returned the rental car.

First few times, I tried following up...toal wastage of my time, not worth it at all...got to a point where I started liking the "surprise" factor, and leave it at that...some things in life (be they miles) are just not worth pursuing, especially with Avis