Capital One Shopping (not the portal where you earn Capital One miles, but Capital One Shopping specifically – where you don’t even need a Capital One credit card to use it) is a portal that I have a love / hate relationship with.
I love how rich the offers can be. I mean, look at these offers below. I actually just used the Walmart one, spending $52 and getting back $50. And it actually tracked!
But that last comment about it tracking is why I also hate Capital One shopping. I’ve had to submit support tickets for more shopping trips for not receiving owed rewards than I have gotten automatically. Based on some of the commenters on this post I wrote about why I was done with Capital One Shopping, I’ll eventually have them tell me they won’t credit any more of their own mistakes, so I look forward to that.
The other issue is that you can only cash out your earned rewards for gift cards and for quite some time, those options have been very meh. I did once enjoy a Hulu gift card, only for the gift card to not actually work at Hulu.
So when I saw Marriott gift cards available for cash out last night, I jumped. (Funny enough, I see that Nick @ Frequent Miler discovered the same, had the same reaction, and also cashed out for Marriott 😉 Nick’s articles on C1 Shopping were how I first got into it, for better or worse!). You can cash out for up to $2,000 per gift card, so I took my unredeemed earnings and went all in for a $400 gift card.
My gift card arrived within about 2 minutes, so that was nice and easy.
But jump quickly, since gift cards are somewhat personalized by account and the good stuff always vanishes quickly, leaving you with things like Boscovs and LL Bean…..
Thoughts?
Cashed out $300, thanks Dave! Always good to also register; load; & lock their cards on the Marriott gift card site
The problem (to me) with the Marriott cards is that you cannot use them to make a reservation. You have to use them as payment at the property. So, if you want to get the lowest rate at Marriott (non-refundable, pre-paid), you have to charge it to your credit card and then hope the hotel will reverse that charge and put it on your gift card instead. I’m not sure that I’m up for that risk.
I hear that. I don’t personally every book prepaid rates (too much risk my plans change) but it’s definitely something to consider.