Earlier today I wrote about a way to combine a bunch of different 1-800-Flowers promotions to help you earn qualifying companion pass points for cheap. This includes an Amex Offer + 1,000 Southwest bonus points + shopping portal bonus. During that post, my entire analysis assumed that the Amex Offer required you to purchase a single transaction of $50 or more to trigger the statement credit. Fortunately, this is not true, and multiple transactions will trigger the statement credit! I also missed that purchasing gift cards SHOULD trigger the statement credit. So here is a new (and better!) analysis on how you can earn 1,000 qualifying companion pass points per 1-800-Flowers order for really cheap!
For every order placed of $29.99 (excluding taxes and delivery fees), you’ll earn 1,000 Southwest Rapid Reward points. Just make sure to use promo code RR22. As of currently writing this post, these points DO count as qualifying points towards the Southwest companion pass. You can view the specific 1-800-Flowers site discussing this promotion here.
Now, there is a new Amex Offer where if you spend $50+ in one or more transactions, you’ll receive a $15 statement credit. That means, if you purchase a $50 gift card it SHOULD (although not verified by yours truly yet) trigger the statement credit. If you have multiple Amex cards, you can purchase many gift cards to then use as a form of payment for your individual $30 purchase. To register for the offer tweet #Amex1800Flowers from your synced Twitter account.
For the ease of numbers, I am assuming someone has 3 registered American Express credit cards for this offer. So let’s say you purchase three $50 gift card purchases, that will ultimately cost you $105 for the $150 total. You’ll then want to go ahead and place 5 separate $30 purchases. The total of these purchases will earn you 5,000 Southwest Rapid Reward points which all currently count towards the companion pass. 5,000 points can be valued at about $75. So for about $30 you are earning the points.
Now… while you most likely will NOT earn bonus points/miles/cash back by going through an online shopping portal for your $30 purchase (since you are using a coupon code), you CAN earn bonus points/miles/cash back for your $50 gift card purchase. While I personally do not have experience which the online shopping portals that count, the Frequent Miler Laboratory has some data that will help.
Based on their reports, readers have earned cash back by going through TopCashBack.com and BeFrugal to purchase the gift cards. As of today, BeFrugal is actually offering 15% cash back which is awesome. So that $150 purchase would earn you $22.50 cash back. TopCashBack.com is only offering 6% cash back, so I suggest going through BeFrugal. Assuming the cash back does work, receiving the $22.50 means you are actually only out of pocket $7.50 which really isn’t so bad at all! For those that have a ton of registered American Express cards, you can really do well by “purchasing” points needed towards the companion pass for relatively cheap. I personally have 12 registered American Express cards for this offer. This means I can earn 20,000 qualifying Southwest points for only $30. For those that do not earn the pass on the old fashion method of flying a ton on paid Southwest tickets or spending a ton on their Southwest credit cards, this is a great deal!
If you plan on taking advantage of this, I suggest getting the 1-800-Flowers Celebration Passport subscription which will give you free shipping..While it is $29.99 a year, you can sign up for a free 30-day trial here. Just make sure to cancel it if you will not be using it after the 30 days. Or if you plan on taking advantage of the many 1-800-Flowers deals that surface to earn points and miles, the $29.99 is well worth it.  You’ll also earn Celebration points ($1 spent = 1 celebration point) which will allow you to earn free flower purchases in the future.
Keep in mind though that things could change at any point. Southwest could not count the points earned towards the companion pass (this happened a few years ago with a different promo code), the online shopping portal payouts could change, etc.
Will you be taking advantage of this? Comment below with your experience!
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If you’re interested in this, just go to Frequent Miler’s site where he writes about this hack all the time and has many more useful tricks to play that DWL leaves out.
In your example. Out of pocket 7.50, how you figure?
3x 50.00 gc=150.00, minus 45.00 (Amex offer 3x 15.00)=105.00, minus 22.50 (15% portal cashback)=82.50 out of pocket.
I agree you do have the miles and you certainly can value them at 75.00, but you have to pay upfront for them, therefore it’s still 82.50 out of pocket.
@Peter V – I took into consideration the value of the Southwest points.