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Cartera Could Do a Better Job of Clarifying Which Purchases Earn Miles (and how many miles)
This is a difficult one to review. First, Cartera is the back-end processing and business logic behind the airlines' on-line shopping rewards programs -- that is, the earn-miles-just-by-shopping programs. Cartera is the company that makes it all happen. Overall, I find Cartera's product to be pretty impressive, especially considering that they are wedged between the vendors and the airlines, all of whom need to buy into Cartera's B2B2C model. However, the implementation leaves a lot to be desired from a consumer standpoint. In an effort to minimize potential downside or 'gaming,' most vendors list exclusions for purchases that do not earn miles. Most of these are entirely reasonable -- e.g., purchasing gift cards does not earn miles -- but some vendors have long lists of exclusions, and it can be difficult to tell whether any given item falls into that list. As an example, I recently purchased lawn chairs from a vendor, only to find that the vendor classified them as camping equipment, which is excluded from earning miles. Cartera says to "keep in mind that it is important to carefully read the terms and conditions for each merchant before making your purchase, as they vary from merchant to merchant and occasionally change." But these terms and conditions can be pretty extensive, not to mention pretty ambiguous (lawn chairs, which could be "Patio & Garden," vs. "Camping Equipment"). Further, that page that lists those exclusions gets flashed up for only a moment before you're taken to the vendor's website -- and if you use the browser extension, the exclusions list is never presented at all! So, even if it WASN'T incredibly ambiguous, how is one supposed to read that list in the first place? I've recommended to Cartera that they have their vendors denote, in the customers' shopping carts, which items earn miles and which do not (and how many miles for those sites that have different mileage rewards for different categories). This is actually pretty straightforward to do; the vendors obviously know this information, as they use it POST-purchase to figure out if a particular purchase earned miles; all I'm suggesting is that they do this in a user's normal course of completing the purchase. As I noted, I've recommended to Cartera that they have their vendors do this. Cartera finally gave me what amounts to a form-letter response: "We've sent this off to the appropriate department for review," which, of course, means it has gone nowhere -- and I really can't blame them for that -- their business model requires that they provide a service that imposes as little effort upon the vendors as possible. Asking them to put more effort into something that could result in prospective purchases being removed from shopping carts is not going to be very attractive. Meanwhile, though, the service continues to be user unfriendly -- although not sufficiently unfriendly that we won't use it.