When and why secondary loyalty programs can prove to be valuable

Total AIR MILES Reward Miles I have earned
in the past 12 months (2,000+ were from
September on!)

I have always stressed that you should focus only a few programs when developing and maintaining a loyalty rewards program portfolio. Since I posted our first ever article on Maximizing the Miles and Points you earn, back in 2005 I advised that you should only focus on one airline, one hotel and/or one shopping (credit card) program. To this day this still holds true for the vast majority of Canadians. Although I have now been telling some people that it is better to diversify and spread you earning and rewards out, this more so for people who are frequent travellers earning tens of thousands of miles or very high credit card spenders putting five figures on their cards each month. The reason for diversification is to shield yourself from program devaluations, why put all your eggs into one or two baskets only to have those baskets lose value over time. No matter what, the sooner you can use your rewards the more value you'll get out of them.  However for many Canadians that read this site it isn't physically possible to collect enough miles in 2 or 3 airline programs, points in 2 or 3 hotel programs and multiple shopping programs to make it worthwhile.

However in that article I do state that it doesn't hurt to join other programs and collect points or miles in them as one day you may be able to use them. I like to call them secondary programs for your loyalty program portfolio. For me one of these secondary programs has been the well known coalition program, AIR MILES. After a big redemption of miles for flights in 2011 the balance in my account dwindled to 330 miles and it took me until the end of August of 2014 to make that balance grow to 1,000 miles. By December of 2014 that balance had grown to three fold to 3,000 miles! So how did this happen, it took three years to earn 670 miles but only four months to add 2,000 more miles?

There were a couple of major contributing factors. Firstly, if you have read the blog portion of  Rewards Canada for at least 5 months you'll have known that both Rexall and Sobeys both switched from Aeroplan to Air Miles in that time and guess what? The most convenient shopping location for me in my community has both Sobeys and Rexall! In the matter of about a month I went from earning Aeroplan miles at 3 retailers in my community's market to 1 (Esso) and 2 moving to Air Miles.  Since I don't like to go out of my way for grocery store and the occasional drug store purchases I still shop at Sobeys and Rexall as it is convenient, hence a sudden increase in the swiping of my Air Miles card. But it wasn't limited to just swiping the card, much like I did before with Aeroplan, I always try to take advantage of bonus mile offers that retailers provide, either by email, in the flyer at the entrance of the store or on products that I may be buying. For example look at a single day of shopping at my community market:

I earned 17 base Air Miles along with 221 bonus miles!  If it wasn't for these bonuses my balance definitely wouldn't grow so fast. I always make sure to read the emails from Sobeys and Rexall for bonuses but every time I walk into Sobeys, I also make sure to check the paper flyer at the front of the store for a bonus coupon. Here is an Instagram pic I took of a flyer and bonus I used just before Christmas:

As much as I would love to be earning Aeroplan miles on all my shopping, I am not going to go out of my way to earn them unless it is an amazing promotion and unfortunately Aeroplan doesn't have any grocery or drug store partners anymore anyways! So the solution is to use a secondary program of mine to make sure I am being rewarded on those purchases. In fact, not only is it with these retailers and Air Miles, but I will always see if I can be rewarded for any and all of my shopping.

The second factor that helped boost my balance in those four months were those great Air Miles bonuses on buying gift cards at Safeway. This is an example of one of those offers that I did go out of my way to take advantage of. Why wouldn't you!?! If you know you are going to shop at retailers that you can use the bonused gift cards at you should go buy them to earn those extra miles.  I won't bore you with the details again in this post but if you want to find out more about this bonus read my
Earning Stories: 540 AIR MILES Rewards Miles for buying Gift Cards at Safewaypost which details the bonuses earned.

So there you have you it, even though the primaries in my loyalty program portfolio are Aeroplan, American Express Membership Rewards, British Airways Executive Club, Diners Club Club Rewards and Starwood Preferred Guest you can see how a matter of convenience and bonus offers have quickly boosted the balance in one of my secondary programs and where in the summer of 2014 I didn't have enough miles for a short haul flight,  I now have enough miles for two short haul flights with some extra miles to boot.

Are you making use of 'secondary' programs in your loyalty program portfolio or do you strictly stick to only a few primary programs? Tell us your stories below!