Airmiles Armchair Chatter

[Donald - my hero]

Check your emails for one from Metro with the subject line: "Can you smell what's cooking?"

Both cards got the offer but the main card can double-dip since I used the garden centre offer a few weeks ago! The fine print says it's good to use once per day BTW

 

[mort1331]

So not to be a downer,,,and you all might know already,,but I hear Staples is pulling out as well.
AM stock down 40% on Sobeys announcemnt. ouch

 

[ottawamom]

I didn't know AM was traded on the stock market.

 

[marchingstar]

Hi Hon
Great to hear from you.
Well I am still collecting a few miles here and there ,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,
I would say if there is something you really want right now go for it.
I do think the Airmiles platform is going to be around for awhile. (More online than instore in my opinion).
Maybe analyze where you collect most of your Airmiles from (*instore / Online *) and decide which reward program works best for you going forward.
My plan is to use mine up for peaceful week/ weekend hotel getaways in the future.


Hugs and welcome back
Mel

Thanks for the advice, Mel

I am thinking about some bigger merch for around the house (a new TV or two, some new kitchen gear, etc.). I am mostly worried about dream points losing a ton of value over the next year. I had so many travel dreams for my points, but pivoting seems like not a bad idea right now.

 

[mort1331]

I didn't know AM was traded on the stock market.

So not directly,,,it is owned by Alliance Data Systems (ADS) on the market.
They traded above $100 last July and now are low $50s,,,gulp,,,mostly on the annoucements of Empire backing out,,,who owns Sobeys +

 

[ottawamom]

All the negative news about Airmiles.

I plan on waiting a little longer and seeing what happens with the program in the next few months. My dream miles, I will use up as soon as I can and the cash miles I collect now I use regulary so they aren't an issue.

I'm not going out of my way (at all) to collect at the moment. I don't have a crystal ball and have given up trying to figure out the path forward from these times we are in. I will sit and wait. A lot of impatient people will leave the program and that may be what Airmiles is after. These last few years have been quite lucrative. A few lean years and things may pick up again.

 

[CanadianKrista]

We decided to use the reminder of our dream miles to rent a cabana at Discovery Cove. However I'm actually a bit short, so will be taking advantage of blue weekend at Sobeys, and doing a bit of a food bank donation for our very in need food banks to make up the difference. After this, my account will be drained.....then I'll wait and see what is happening before deciding if I will continue to try to earn more miles for the future, or stick with PC. My issue with PC is my need to limit to their gift cards/swap while doing groceries. The whole "spend and bank" system doesn't really work well for us, So to do anything other than Disney is difficult. They do have Air Canada gift cards I guess we could use towards a vacation. I do like the flexibility of Airmiles, but with the ability to earn diminishing, it's hard to keep working at it.

 

[hdrolfe]

We decided to use the reminder of our dream miles to rent a cabana at Discovery Cove. However I'm actually a bit short, so will be taking advantage of blue weekend at Sobeys, and doing a bit of a food bank donation for our very in need food banks to make up the difference. After this, my account will be drained.....then I'll wait and see what is happening before deciding if I will continue to try to earn more miles for the future, or stick with PC. My issue with PC is my need to limit to their gift cards/swap while doing groceries. The whole "spend and bank" system doesn't really work well for us, So to do anything other than Disney is difficult. They do have Air Canada gift cards I guess we could use towards a vacation. I do like the flexibility of Airmiles, but with the ability to earn diminishing, it's hard to keep working at it.

the only problem with the Air Canada giftcards is I think they are limited when you use them? You can only use two payment forms and you can't combine a bunch of cards, so two $500 cards wouldn't pay for some flights if you have multiple people going, or a package or whatever. Unless it's different for packages? I would make sure before you invest too much there though.
I do like Disney cards since I tend to book direct and can use them to pay for meals and stuff on site.

 

[Pumpkin1172]

My issue with PC is my need to limit to their gift cards/swap while doing groceries. The whole "spend and bank" system doesn't really work well for us, So to do anything other than Disney is difficult. They do have Air Canada gift cards I guess we could use towards a vacation. I do like the flexibility of Airmiles, but with the ability to earn diminishing, it's hard to keep working at it.

I talked to dh about what we are going to do.

I have decided that instead of swapping out for gc, I have opened up a savings account and as we are on the way home from shopping, I will transfer the money saved in groceries into the bank account. That way we can just use it towards what we want with our cc. I have nicknamed it so it goes into the correct savings as we have a few separate savings accounts for different things. I didn't want to be stuck with all disney gc. I'm obsessive about making sure that I keep track of the different savings accounts so I know I'll be making sure to transfer the funds on our way home from shopping in the truck lol.

 

[ilovetotravel1977]

the only problem with the Air Canada giftcards is I think they are limited when you use them? You can only use two payment forms and you can't combine a bunch of cards, so two $500 cards wouldn't pay for some flights if you have multiple people going, or a package or whatever. Unless it's different for packages? I would make sure before you invest too much there though.
I do like Disney cards since I tend to book direct and can use them to pay for meals and stuff on site.

For flights yes, two forms of payment. However, you can use the gift cards towards payments on all inclusive vacation packages. I got confirmation of that from a local travel agent.

 

[cari12]

All the negative news about Airmiles.

I plan on waiting a little longer and seeing what happens with the program in the next few months. My dream miles, I will use up as soon as I can and the cash miles I collect now I use regulary so they aren't an issue.

I'm not going out of my way (at all) to collect at the moment. I don't have a crystal ball and have given up trying to figure out the path forward from these times we are in. I will sit and wait. A lot of impatient people will leave the program and that may be what Airmiles is after. These last few years have been quite lucrative. A few lean years and things may pick up again.

I am taking the wait and see approach.

As far as the parent company’s stock going down. I agree part is due to Sobeys but all the markets are down right now so it’s not all because of that. IF AirMiles gets some new sponsors in replacement it’s price may spring back up.
Also the move for Sobeys to Scene+ makes sense for them since they own the scene+ program. So probably less of an “against Airmiles” and more of a “expand the program we already own”.

 

[ilovetotravel1977]

I received this email last week from Scene+. As long as I can earn a good amount of points and be able to redeem them similarly like Air Miles, I will be happy. But I am still going to cancel my BMO AM mastercard.

 

[bababear_50]

So how many packages of Crispy Minis can you fit into a shopping cart?

Hugs Mel

 

[CanadianKrista]

Haha….I got 700AM yesterday just with my food bank run - doing regular groceries today with some more of the offers. I had Oreos, digestives, crackers and 36 crispy minis…..

 

[dancin Disney style]

I've got 57K miles in my Dream account. I have always said if I need to get out fast I will order a bunch of WDW park tickets and save them for later...knowing that I will have to pay a little OOP in the future to use them. My secondary plan would be to book myself a nice trip to Mexico. There are a couple of really expensive resorts that I would love to go to and my miles would cover about half.

That said, I don't feel like AM is going anywhere. I've been a member since day one....I don't recall when they started but it's been around 30 years. Lots of changes over the years. For sure there have been much better times with regard to collecting. I went from taking 4years to earn enough for a WDW ticket to earning enough for 4-5 per year. The peak for sure has been with this group. I also collect PC points but those have always been predominantly saved up to cover my groceries during the winter when I have several weeks off of work. I feel like PC is the same right now as AM....used to be tons of great offers but not so much now. I used to be able to easily collect 20-25K a week or more....now I probably average 5-6K a week.

 

[cari12]

I've got 57K miles in my Dream account. I have always said if I need to get out fast I will order a bunch of WDW park tickets and save them for later...knowing that I will have to pay a little OOP in the future to use them. My secondary plan would be to book myself a nice trip to Mexico. There are a couple of really expensive resorts that I would love to go to and my miles would cover about half.

That said, I don't feel like AM is going anywhere. I've been a member since day one....I don't recall when they started but it's been around 30 years. Lots of changes over the years. For sure there have been much better times with regard to collecting. I went from taking 4years to earn enough for a WDW ticket to earning enough for 4-5 per year. The peak for sure has been with this group. I also collect PC points but those have always been predominantly saved up to cover my groceries during the winter when I have several weeks off of work. I feel like PC is the same right now as AM....used to be tons of great offers but not so much now. I used to be able to easily collect 20-25K a week or more....now I probably average 5-6K a week.

Same, I’ve been an AM collector since 1994 and got the card because we lived near a Safeway. In the beginning it took a while to get enough for anything. This group had increased my AM collecting tremendously. I never used to try for the big promos but learned here it’s not as hard as it seemed.
I only have about 5600 AM right now because I used redeemed for flights and hotel for 5 nights in Ottawa for the 4 of us for my nephew’s wedding in August.
Once the transition happens I’m thinking we’ll see some good offers from both programs to entice us to collect.

 

[bababear_50]

Haha….I got 700AM yesterday just with my food bank run - doing regular groceries today with some more of the offers. I had Oreos, digestives, crackers and 36 crispy minis…..

LOL
Well i dropped by late last night and the team of new recruits were being shown how to bag the food drive bags.
They were pretty low so I decided to help them out.
I was able to get 90 bags into the cart and racked up 950 Airmiles plus the spend 125 get 100 Airmiles.
Ice cream cones turned into a different kind of shop.
Hugs Mel

 

[ilovetotravel1977]

Same here for being in the air miles game since it started.

As for PC Optimum, those offers are not as great or consistent anymore. For example, my SDM 20x offer this weekend is for $100 (!). That used to be $50 consistently. I can barely do $60 at SDM when buying solely grocery items. I just got my air miles on my MC for the month. I earned 220 AM for this month and 62 of those were accelerator (3x) miles for shopping at partners (Sobeys, Shell). So when Sobeys leaves, my earning on my MC will be little most months.

I wonder if/when air miles will be bringing back the bonus booms/boost? If I don't have Sobeys, Lawtons, Mastercard, five offers will be REALLY difficult for me.

 

[marcyleecorgan]

Agreed. My 'issue' right now is we have approximately 25,200 air miles ($2700.00), and I'm paranoid about the entire program going in the gutter, but I don't know what to do with the AMs. Normally we would use AMs to purchase Disney passes, but we were just in WDW in October, and DL in May, so we won't be going any time soon (3-4 years at least).

I was checking out the travel packages and cruises, and I *think* that for us, a cruise is a better bang for the buck. We have two different Visa cards both with Avion points (business and personal), plus a WestJet MasterCard, so airfare isn't much of an issue. Unfortunately, the vacation packages all include air, so that feels like a waste of the AMs to me.

The cruises look decent, I've been looking at the Caribbean, Europe and Alaska, and now my head hurts, lol...

Help...

Oh i hear you! My husband says he doesn't even care about the loss of the ~$3000 worth of AM at this point!!! D:
"It's complicated," he says. "Used to give them my phone number, now it's a whole 3-ring circus to get some *points*. "
I don't blame him, nearly everything he has tried to use the AM online shopping portal for has been a disaster.
Plus So many stores stopped using the program that it's hard to remember when to pull out the card or not!
We have flights taken care of by the CC rewards, we have lodging, we aren't big on excursions... what the heck do we need the AM for? LOL
Visiting Disney really confirmed to us that we are so not interested in "vacations" where "managing our expectations while we enjoy amenities with 20k other humans" are in the same sentence!!!
But I like the camaraderie of our little group!

 

[ilovetotravel1977]

Oh i hear you! My husband says he doesn't even care about the loss of the ~$3000 worth of AM at this point!!! D:
"It's complicated," he says. "Used to give them my phone number, now it's a whole 3-ring circus to get some *points*. "
I don't blame him, nearly everything he has tried to use the AM online shopping portal for has been a disaster.
Plus So many stores stopped using the program that it's hard to remember when to pull out the card or not!
We have flights taken care of by the CC rewards, we have lodging, we aren't big on excursions... what the heck do we need the AM for? LOL
Visiting Disney really confirmed to us that we are so not interested in "vacations" where "managing our expectations while we enjoy amenities with 20k other humans" are in the same sentence!!!
But I like the camaraderie of our little group!

Switch your account to Cash miles. That way when you redeem them, you can just put that money into a savings/travel fund and use it however you want to. I still have 7,400 Dream miles after using 10,000 on our FL flights (!). I have had our two AM accounts as Cash miles for a couple of years now and redeem them regularly.