Earn up to 6 miles/dollar on Apple purchases

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Shopping through online portals can be a great way to boost a loyalty account balance, to save some cash, or to even prevent a loyalty balance from expiring, and right now a number of the portals are offering a pretty good earnings rate for purchases made with Apple…although not all purchases will qualify.

I generally use the evreward.com site to check which sites are offering the best earnings rate at whatever store(s) I’m planning to shop at and it looks like the major airline portals have all increased the number of miles they’re offering for Apple purchases.

The best deals appear to be the following:

• Alaska Mileage Plan – 6 miles/dollar
• American Airlines AAdvantage – 6 miles/dollar
• United MileagePlus – 5 miles/dollar

For the purposes of comparison, Rakuten is currently only offering up to 2% cashback and TopCashBack.com (which evrewards doesn’t cover) is offering up to 4% cashback.

Assuming you value your preferred airline currency at more than 0.67 – 0.80  cents/point, the airline portals are offering the better deals.

The More Important Terms

The key thing to be aware of is the fact that not all Apple purchases will trigger the enhanced earnings.

Per the terms and conditions (which you’ll find on the individual airline portals) the following items will not earn 5 -6 miles/dollar:

• New iPad Pro
• New MacBook Air
• Mac Pro
• Gift cards
• Gift wrap
• Bose products
• Apple Developer Programs
• Shipping.

There are a few other restrictions you should know about too:

• You may not purchase for resale
• Customers will only earn miles on up to five units per eligible product, except iPhone, in which case only two units within a thirty-day period are eligible.
• Using a coupon or discount code not found on the portal will invalidate the mileage earning
• Purchases made with a gift card may be ineligible.

Which credit card to use

By shopping through an online portal you’ll earn the miles that the portal is offering and you can earn more miles, points, or cash back by using a good credit card.

If you’re looking to earn a good rate of cash back, the Citi® Double Cash Card is a very good option as it earns 2% cash back on all purchases with no cap on the cash back you can earn(1% cash back when you buy and 1% when you pay for those purchases)

If you happen to hold one of the Citi ThankYou points earning credit cards you can convert cash back earned from the Citi® Double Cash card into ThankYou points at a ratio of 1:1.

If you’re looking to earn points the best credit card to use will be card_name which earns 2 Membership Rewards points/dollar on all eligible spending (up to a spending limit of $50,000) and 1 point/dollar thereafter (terms apply).

Bottom Line

I can’t see an end date for the boosted points earnings at Apple but this deal is unlikely to be around for very long (it may even be gone by tomorrow). If you’ve been planning to make an Apple purchase (and it’s a purchase that isn’t excluded in the portal terms and conditions) now may be a good time to pull the trigger.