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Exchange Your Gift Cards For Miles With United Is Back




When I first started writing this blog, I wrote about exchanging gift cards for United miles with Plastic Jungle. Then I followed up a couple of times about Plastic Jungle, once if they were going out of business and lastly they had a silent death where CardCash/ABC Gift Cards bought out Plastic Jungle.

The good news is CardCash/ABC Gift Cards has brought back the trade the gift cards to United miles program:

United

 

In the top graphic, you will notice the third option, exchanging your gift cards for United miles. I was eager to see what it was available. The landing page is exactly like it once was:

united_giftcardexchange

 

Here’s the list of retailers they “accept”:

Stores
Aldo Shoes
American Airlines
American Eagle
Armani Exchange
Athleta
Barnes & Noble
Bass Pro Shops
Best Buy
Brooks Brothers
Cheesecake Factory
Columbia Sportswear
Cracker Barrel
DSW
Fye
GameStop
Home Depot
Hot Topic
J. Crew
JoS. A. Bank
Kohls
Macys
Nordstrom
Office Max
Overstock
Pottery Barn
Puma
Saks 5th Ave
Sears
Southwest Airlines
Starbucks
Sur La Table
Target
Ticketmaster
Toys R us
Urban Outfitters
Victorias Secret
Walmart
West Elm
Williams-Sonoma
Yankee Candle

I use “accept” loosely because when you start to type in some of those names they won’t pop up for you to sell in the following pages. Here’s your returns on the gift cards:

united_giftcard_miles_2014

 

 

If you type in “walmart” to sell, they will not accept it.

 

united_giftcardexchange_walmart

 

 

Instead, they’ll take Walgreens which is not listed.

united_giftcardexchange_walgreens

 

The entire UX (User eXperience) is poor. They are using a javascript to automatically populate the gift card company name and is pretty annoying. I type fast and can hit the backspace pretty quickly. Try doing this with some of the autofill when you enter the card information.

 

Conclusion:

To get back on topic, the site has always claimed at “minimum” you will receive X number of miles, but I have always seen a fixed number from the graphic they post. Because of this, the gift card arbitrage opportunity here is to buy the least valued gift card and sell it through the Gift Card Exchange. My favorite kind of arbitrage, a floor price.

I hope they(Cardcash/ABC Gift Cards) bring this back for the US Bank Flexperks, it was the one reason why I signed up for the Flexperks credit card.

I also find it absolutely comical that they’re accepting American Airline gift cards to convert into United miles. In the previous iteration of this, all other competing air carriers were off limits

 

13 comments… add one
  • I made the mistake of cashing in some Discover cashback for $40 in Brookstone cards when the gift card exchange was offering decent bonuses… By the time the cards arrived, Brookstone was still LISTED as a card they accepted, but as you pointed out above the listed cards don’t appear to mach the cards you can actually trade for miles.

    Reply
    • That has happened to me in the past, I bought ~$2k worth of Starbucks gift cards and had to hold it for 2 months before the rates increased

      Reply
      • Hoh-lee-crap, $2k???

        Reply
        • Yep and since then I try to keep too much gift cards on hand at one time.

          Reply
  • This is good news. Do you know any other programs (airlines or hotels) that exchange gift cards for points/miles?

    Reply
  • Here’s the list:
    American Eagle
    American Airlines
    AMC Theaters
    Armani Exchange
    Athleta
    Bass Pro Shops
    Barnes & Noble
    Bahama Breeze
    Best Buy
    Bed Bath & Beyond
    Best Western
    BJs Restaurant
    Bloomingdales
    Bonefish Grill
    Brooks Brothers
    Brookstone
    Burlington
    Buffalo Wild Wings
    Cabelas
    Carters
    Cheesecake Factory
    Chipotle
    Cinemark
    Coffee Bean
    Converse
    Container Store
    Columbia
    Cracker Barrel
    CVS
    Diary Queen
    Darden Restaurants
    Dell
    Dining Dough
    DSW
    Dunkin’ Donuts
    Elephant Bar
    Flemings Steakhouse
    Fye
    Gamestop
    Godiva
    Home Depot
    Hobby Lobby
    Hot Topic
    In-N-Out Burger
    JCPenney
    JoS A. Bank
    Jo-Ann
    Kohls
    Lane Bryant
    Lids
    Macys
    Marshalls
    Nine West
    North Face
    Office Max
    Office Depot
    Olive Garden
    Outback Steakhouse
    Overstock
    Petco
    Peets Coffee & Tea
    Pottery Barn
    Pottery Barn Teen
    Puma
    Red Lobster
    Ruths Chris
    Saks 5th Ave
    Sally Beauty
    Sears
    Southwest Airlines
    Starbucks
    Sur La Table
    Target
    Taco Bell
    Urban Outfitters
    Victoria’s Secret
    Walgreens
    West Elm
    White House Black Market
    Williams-Sonoma
    Zumiez

    Reply
  • BTW, I’m not really seeing the point of this. Lets take a look at an example. You can get 4,000 UA miles for a $100 gift card. Or 2.5 cents a mile. So you look for a gift card you can buy at a discount. You get an amazing discount of 50%. You take a risk buying it from an eBay seller. Wait a while. And sell it. So you pick up the points for 1.25 cents a mile? Is that really worth spending a lot of cash for?

    Reply
    • Yep, that’s the premise, buy gift cards for cheap and then convert into miles.

      Reply
      • How is paying 1.25c “cheap”? Plenty of MS opportunities you can do for half that cost (or less). And with bigger volume/higher velocity. I hate to pay 0.7c per point, let alone more than 1c.

        The best deal that I found was buying PETCO cards (for a while they were selling at 23% discount), but even that didn’t make any sense.

        Reply
        • You’d need to be on the look out for better deals to drop the average cost. You may need to also finagle with paying the credit card with a rewards earning/earned debit card

          It’s not going to be easy and not quite the usual velocity method one would do while manufactured spending

          Reply

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