Receive Free Points/Miles By Connecting Your E-mail To Airseed ($25 United/Alaska, $10 Southwest, 500 SPG points etc)

Update: Please read to the end of the post for an update from Airseed CEO & Co-founder

The Offer

Direct link to offer

• Receive a reward by linking your e-mail account to Airseed. These are the rewards currently being offered:
• Airlines:
  • United Airlines $25 gift card
  • Alaska Airlines $25 gift card
  • Southwest Airlines $10 gift card
  • Virgin America 500 miles
• Hotels:
  • Starwood Preferred Guest 500 points
  • Marriott 1,000 points
  • Wyndham 1,000 points

The Fine Print

• Must be at least 18 years of age or older
• Must be a valid US resident
• Must have an existing loyalty membership with the selected program
• Not everybody will be eligible, but Airseed gives no details on their eligibility requirements

Our Verdict

Update: Just received this e-mail from the CEO & Co-founder:

Saw your post. You had some good feedback about Airseed and I understand the hesitation in not opting in and redeeming an offer.

We’re a Google Ventures backed startup that’s building a platform to redeem offers, points, etc. Think ‘TripIt for Rewards’. You haven’t heard of us, because we’ve been stealth for the past 2 years and are now finally becoming more public.

For the airlines and hotels we’re working with, we enable a customer like you to indirectly tell Virgin for example “Hey I have loyalty with you, but United just offered a cheaper flight and I’m going to book with them.” Virgin would rather have you book with them (and so would you since you have loyalty with Virgin), but they wouldn’t know the situation otherwise unless you forward them or import your past and upcoming itineraries. Offering points and miles is one of the aspects of our platform.

p.s. – Kima was one of our first investors among many others, for some reason that Crunchbase page doesn’t get updated appropriately

I’m not a big fan of giving anybody full access to my e-mail accounts, let alone a company I’ve never heard of before. According to Crunch Base they have received one round of funding of an undisclosed amount which was back in 2013 from Kima Ventures. That still doesn’t exactly fill me with confidence.

It looks like they basically resell this information to their partners so they can send you “insights based offers” & “event driven marketing”. One example they give is that a hotel chain would be able to see that 7,238 customers booked a car rental or flight in the past week but no hotel.

Personally I’d never give a company like this access to all of my e-mails. I value my privacy way to much, I might miss out on a deal here there and there but it’s not worth it to me. One could presumably just change their e-mail address temporarily to something they don’t use and then sign up for this service to get the bonus. But it looks like Airseed is ready for this with these weasel words (emphasis mine):

Airseed will quickly verify your loyalty membership info to the specific offer. If eligible, we will send you an email with the selected offer.

What are your thoughts on Airseed?

Direct link to offer

Hat tip to SemiGraven from /r/churning