Skift Take

Airlines are doing their best to personalize offers to customers, and UsingMiles should consider doing likewise for users in the free results instead of just doing it for premium members. Otherwise, it clutters up UsingMiles for the average user.

Flying to Chicago’s O’Hare and in the market for some bonus airline, hotel and credit-card miles or points offers?

Mileage-program management site UsingMiles began integrating such deals alongside its flight-search results.

Thus, alongside various US Airways flight options for a Newark to ORD roundtrip, UsingMiles serves up offers for 15,000 bonus miles for joining Delta SkyMiles, 30,000 miles for signing up for a Gold Delta SkyMiles credit card, and triple airline miles from Marriott for a second stay anywhere worldwide, for example.

Not very relevant unless …

The offers in these free search results at times may not be particularly relevant. If you are considering a US Airways flight, for instance, a Delta SkyMiles offer may not be on your agenda — especially if you already are a SkyMiles member.

Denver-based UsingMiles only personalizes the miles and points offers based on your actual loyalty account memberships once you sign up for a UsingMiles premier membership at $29.99 per year, although there is an introductory offer to try it out for free.

The offers are also personalized based on your destination and intended travel times.

Competition is fierce among the loyalty management sites and a shakeout is in the offing. Many of these companies are naturally trying their best to improve site features to make miles go further and to increase value for users.

For example, in addition to this new feature from UsingMiles, MileWise recently partnered with ITA Software to show flight options with payments split between cash, miles and points.

Earn, baby, earn

Krista Paul, UsingMiles founder and vice president of marketing, notes that UsingMiles, like MileWise, will offer some forthcoming redemption features, but today’s feature launch focuses on the earn side.

“We have a lot on the table on the redemption side,” Paul says. “On the earn side, we’re helping people to ensure they are not leaving any money on the table when they are traveling.”

In addition to the airline, hotel and credit card offers currently on UsingMiles, Paul says the company expects to add daily deals from sites such as Groupon and LivingSocial, other retail offers, and restaurant deals, as well.

UsingMIles, which tracks more than 200 loyalty programs, also intends to introduced an “optimized” hotel search soon.

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Tags: deals, loyalty

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