Earn Airmiles with Your Credit Card

The Airmiles campaign was one of the first to initiate the drive to ‘save as you spend’ for consumers. Now, in the 20 years since the initiative has been running, customers can collect miles at over 200 retail outlets on the high street, as well as online.

Collecting Airmiles while using a credit card is a popular way to make it to your dream destination in what could be less the time than it would take you to otherwise save. You can use your credit card to collect miles on most items you buy, whether food shopping, or online clothes shopping, or when paying for petrol. Because of the proliferation of companies signed up to this type of programme, its collectors can see the accumulation of Airmiles take place at pace.

Airmiles used towards free flights worldwide also include airline taxes and fees so, as the collector, you don’t end up paying additional costs. Furthermore, they offer journeys on a simple seven tier plan, which takes collectors from the minimum spend of 750 miles up to 10,000 miles, around the world.

For 750 points, you could travel anywhere within the UK, as well as to nearby European cities such as Amsterdam, Brussels and Paris. The next tier up – 1,500 miles – will take you as far afield as Prague, Nice, Rome and Madrid. 2,500 miles will allow you to travel to Helsinki, Warsaw, Athens and Tunis and even further with 5,000 miles. 5,000 miles takes you transatlantic, to Washington DC, New York and Boston. At 6,500 miles, collectors are really flying, hitting destinations like Toronto, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Nairobi and Barbados. At 8,000 miles, you could travel as far as Los Angeles, Rio De Janeiro, Cape Town and Mauritius and at the top tier – 10,000 miles – the sky’s the limits for collectors, who can fly worldwide for free.

The Reward Programme is designed as a loyalty scheme and has a number of independent arms across the world, including in Canada and the US, the Middle East and Europe. As with all loyalty schemes, the more collectors spend, the more miles they can accumulate.

The Programme was so popular when it first emerged, that within three months of launching nearly three million collections had registered on the Airmiles database. Today, in excess of eight million people collect Airmiles. With so many retailers available in which to spend and collect, and the ease with which collectors can make purchases using their credit cards, the most difficult decision may be choosing which destination to visit first.