If i download the shopping assistants for Delta, UA and AA will they create problems with each other? I do quite a few searches over the course of a month and was wondering if it is possible to have all 3 search bars and use each one around 300x a month for max miles. Do they interfere with each other if you have more than 1?

Also, can you have a card connected to more than 1 dining program at the same time. Can a card linked to skymiles dining also be linked to AAdvantage dining?

AFAIK you cannot link one card with more than one program. All the programs are run by the same contractor and rely on the registered card number to allocate the restaurant charge to the right program.

However, there is nothing to keep you from having several cards registered in several different programs.

One friend tells me he just registers each card in the related program so he can keep track. AA Citi registered in AA Dining, UAL in UAL Dining etc. @:-)

When you register a credit card with a new program, it is automatically removed from the program with which it was previously registered. You get two email confirmation notifications: one from the program that gained the card and one from the program that lost the card. You could actually use just one credit card for all of your dining programs so long as you remember to register the card for the dining program that should get credit for that day's meal. That's helpful when you're trying to meet a minimum spend requirement for one specific credit card.

So, no, you won't be able to double (or triple) dip the restaurant programs.

Well, the first quesiton is, will you have any space left in your browser if you install all 3? When I installed the Delta toolbar, it added a whole separate toolbar line to the browser. If you could install all 3, I wouldn't be suprirsd if it would install 3 separate toolbars, signficantly reducing the height of the remaining screen area in your browser.

I hate the screen height just one takes up enough that I'm going to get rid of it as soon as my bonus for downloading it posts (said bonus is very late, even by the "worst case" of when it was to have posted).

And I find the toolbar to work rather poorly. It doesn't flag half the participating merchants that are actually on the shopping website, so I find it pretty useless. Which is another reason I'll dump it as soon as the bonus posts (and don't want another one).

Given that it doesn't flag half the participating merchants, you might as well just bookmark the three shopping sites and search them each time you want to buy something through them.

Yes, the set of merchants is not exactly the same in each one. But that's exactly one of the places I find it to not work: It never flags the merchants who are only in DL shopping and not in the other two! (Thus I'd consider it especially useless to install all 3; if you wanted to shop at all 3 shopping portals, at most you could maybe use the shopping toolbar of one to find merchants who are likely in all 3, and then go through the shopping portal to actaully buy.)

Note: You have to clear your cookies for that site if you visit a site first without using the shopping portal, and soon therefafter through the shopping portal. The shopping portals work via cookies, but at some sites may not set the shopping portal cookies correctly if you already have other cookies from visiting the site directly in your browser.

One possible solution: Install a different type of browser than you normally use (there's plenty of them around) for use with the shopping portals, where you can simply clear all cookies before each shopping portal visit. (Since you won't be using that particular browser for anything else, you shouldn't mind clearling absolutely all coookies each time, and that's the easiest thing to do.) Coolies don't get confused between different types of browsers (say, IE vs Netscape vs Chrome), only within a given type of browser.

No, and to keep a dining account alive, you have to leave at least one card registered in it.

Tip: If you only have one current card you want to use for diining, but want to sometimes dine crediting to one program and sometimes another, find 3 MC/Visa gift cards (even if they're expired) or old credit/debit cards (even if they're expired) and register one in each of the programs. That'll be enough to keep it alive. (The dining programs don't ask for your expiration date, only your card number, so as long as its a valid card number, if if no longer active, they'll accept it, and thus you can use it as a placeholder.)

Only once you have a "leave it always there" card registered in each program, can you move your main card from one program to another and back and forth as you wish.

All the toolbars I've installed all have terrible search results powered by yahoo. I'm two months into using the Hawaiian airlines toolbar. It works for earning miles for purchase BUT usually I have to do two searches--one on the toolbar, and another in google just to find a reasonable search result. It becomes mind numbing with just one toolbar I can't imagine using 3.

Also if you think it is easy to generate tons of points by searching for random crazy stuff--it gets very very old very very quick. It is becoming really hard work for me to get 175 miles/mo from the HA toolbar. You'd divide that in 3 if you install 3 and use each 1/3 of the time.