Confusingly, both of them are called ‘MeliaRewards Shopping’. First look at what can be earned and burned with new eStores and how to make sense of it all.

This month Melia hotels’ loyalty program MeliaRewards, together with Points.com and Collinson Group launched its own shopping portal: MeliaRewards Shopping. It’s a wonderful news on its own: now we got another way to earn valuable MeliaRewards points and to spend them. Melia even recorded this interesting video about it.

To my surprise, from the official press release I learned that Melia, in fact, launched not one, but two (!) shopping eStores: one to earn points, and another one to spend them. Both are called MeliaRewards Shopping. Let’s have a closer look at them.

eStore for earning points – The Earn eStore (I didn’t make it up, that’s how they call it in the press release!)

Facts

MeliaRewards Shopping eStore for earning points on your shopping is here: https://meliarewardsallshopping.melia.com

Regions available: US, UK, Italy, France, Spain.

Languages available: English, French, Spanish, Italian.

According to official press-release, shoppers can buy goods and services from 1,800 leading retailers, including John Lewis, El Corte Ingles, Fnac, and Aliexpress.

Design

Overall design and categories look suspiciously familiar of IberiaPluStore. In fact, they are exactly the same! But this shouldn’t come as a surprise because both of them are designed by Collinson Group, which also designed the Avios.com eStore, which also has exactly the same menu.

Earning rate (poor)

What is not the same is the earning rate: it’s much poorer than earning rate in avios.

Unlike avios eStores, MeliaRewards often gives you less than 1 point for 1 euro you spend. Therefore they decided to raise the minimum comparable amount in euros to 10. So all points earnings you see starts from 10 euro spend. For example, for shopping on eBay you will earn 1 avios for every euro on IberiaPluStore but only 0.8 MeliaRewards points.

Partners (different)

Many partners overlap with IberiaPluStore, so often it’s better to buy via them and get more avios. Good news is that there are many partners do not overlap. For example, travel category looks particularly interesting. One can earn MeliaRewards points when booking flights with Lufthansa, Brussels Airlines, LATAM Airlines, Etihad, Emirates, Austrian, Terravision, Flixbus and more. Different region has different partners. Not sure how strictly this is enforced though…

eStore for burning points – Redemption eStore

Facts:

MeliaRewards redemption website to spend your MeliaRewards points is here: http://meliarewardshopping.melia.com/

Regions available: 140 regions globally. Shipping included in the price.

Languages available: English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese.

What’s on offer

There are various items on sale. Quoting the press release, ‘The new Redemption eStore gives MeliáRewards members access to over 4,000 reward items across different categories, including the likes of electronics, health and beauty and travel, with delivery capabilities to over 140 regions globally.

Price

Interestingly, shoppers can pay 100% in points, or part in points and part in cash. In case of latter, they will earn MeliaRewards points on the money they spend. There is a sliding arrow on the product page, which lets you choose how much you want to pay in euros and how much in points. According to my observations, you can reduce the price in points only by around 1/3.

Overall I find the price in points quite high and wouldn’t recommend to spend them that way unless you have no other option at all. For example, iPhone 7 128Gb is offered for 276,246 points (although you can bring this figure down to 141,014 points if you are willing to pay 439.51 euros in cash…).

Official Apple Store is offering this phone for €749. On the other hand 276,000 MeliaRewards points can buy you a week at the luxurious Gran Melia Palacio de Isora, Tenerife, which represents at least €1,177 of value (see screenshots below). That’s over €400 euros more than the price of the iPhone.

Quirks

As a side note, is it just me who finds the website naming quite sloppy? As far as I know, the official program is called MeliaRewards, so it seems like they missed one ‘s’ here: it should be MeliaRewardsshopping… I know it wouldn’t look good with double ‘s’ and can lead to some mistakes when users are typing in the address but still. Now it reads either ‘Melia Reward Shopping’ (which is fine on its own, but contradicts with the name of the website ‘MeliaRewards Shopping) or ‘MeliaRewards Hopping’… 🙂 Let’s hope this new eStore will make us hopping with joy after earning lots of miles with our purchase or making a good redemption! 🙂

 

My opinion

I am always happy to see more options to earn and burn points. I am especially excited to see MeliaRewards evolving. Launching own eStore (or rather 2 of them!) is a big step for the loyalty program and it will surely benefit everyone.

It’s great to see that we have more eStores to choose from: Melia, Iberia, Avios, simply cashback websites… Competition is always great! This will hopefully allow us always to earn a little extra with almost any shopping partner we choose.

I personally would earn but won’t burn my MeliaRewards points via shopping portals. Usually, the return is quite poor and I rather prefer spending my points at Melia hotels. But if this option is not available (if you have a lot of MeliaRewards points and live in a region without Melia hotels), then it’s a perfect alternative.

 

Finally…

Here I selected some shops and their earning rate for Spanish region of MeliaRewards Earn eStore. Other regions will have other shops and other earning rates.

The highest number of points:

Norton – 478 points for €10

BullGuard – 196 points for €10

BitDefender – 140 points for €10

GoDaddy – 84 points for €10

Useful shops:

eBay – 8 points for €10

Aliexpress – 39 points for €10

El Corte Ingles – 16 points for €10

Debenhams – 39 points for €10

Asos – 78 points for €10

Groupon – 51 points for €10

Food:

JustEat 67 points for €10

Travel:

Brussels airlines – 8 points for €10

Latam – 11 points for €10

Lufthansa – 8 points for €10

Terravision – 19 points for €10

 

MeliaRewards Shopping eStore for earning points on your shopping is here: https://meliarewardsallshopping.melia.com

MeliaRewards redemption website to spend your MeliaRewards points is here: http://meliarewardshopping.melia.com/

Let me know your thoughts in the comments! 🙂