How Does AIR MILES Receipts Work?
In the summer of 2023, AIR MILES introduced its AIR MILES Receipts program to members living in Atlantic Canada. As of November 2023, all Air Miles members across the country can now take part. I gave it my first try today and it worked like a charm, as I share my personal experience today.
How it works
We can now earn bonus Air Miles (over and above any base amount earned) by scanning a receipt from a grocery store into the AIR MILES App. Note that the App must be installed on your mobile device, so the desktop version of Air Miles will not work.
I just did my first purchase today that earned me the 23 bonus miles. All I had to do was log into my Air Miles App, click on the follow button:
Then I looked to see if any of the items of items I purchased today showed up on the list. Sure enough one did. So I scanned a copy of my receipt (within 14 days maximum) through the App and let the system process. Then poof! My 23 bonus miles (20 + 3) were rewarded automatically.
You may notice in my screenshot above that the bonus miles were awarded by Air Miles directly and not by the grocery store. This is why I mentioned that these bonus miles are earned over and above any miles you could have earned if the grocery store is a partner of Air Miles as well.
List of grocery stores
The good news that there is a large number of groceries stores (who are not even partners of Air Miles) who qualify for this bonus opportunity. The current list in alphabetical order includes:
- Atlantic Co-op
- Atlantic Superstore
- Buy-Low Foods
- Calgary Co-op
- Co-op
- Colemans
- Costco
- Dollarama
- Dominion
- Farm Boy
- Food Basics
- Foodland
- Fortinos
- FreshCo
- Giant Tiger
- IGA
- Independent City Market
- Les Marchés Tradition
- Loblaws
- Longo’s
- Marché Bonichoix
- Metro
- Nesters Market
- Maxi
- No Frills
- Provigo
- Real Canadian Superstore
- Quality Foods
- Safeway
- Sobeys
- Save-On-Foods
- Super C
- T&T Supermarket
- Thrifty Foods
- Value-mart
- Walmart
- Wholesale Club
- Your Independent Grocer
- Zehrs
Thoughts
I believe that is quite an extensive list of grocery stores that qualify to earn bonus miles. The miles are credited so quickly as well. Basically I paid for my groceries, sat down on a bench right in front of the cashier. Snapped a photo of the receipt before it gets crumpled. Within 10 seconds or so, my bonus miles were credited. Basically I received my miles before I even left the store. How great is that?
I am super impressed with how easy it is to upload a receipt and for it to detect that I purchased a qualified item. Three thumbs up to BMO and Air Miles on this one!!!
Please share your experience with Air Miles Receipts in the comment section below!
I am a long time Air Miles collector who shops at Safeway in western Canada. I have tried Air Miles receipts several times and have not been able to get it to work. The app will recognize the receipt but then not be able to recognize any valid offers on the receipt (even though they are valid offers). I am thinking it may be because the Safeway receipts don’t always provide an adequate enough description of the product – for example, for a recent offer, I bought the qualifying yogurt but the noticed the Safeway receipt didn’t indicate which brand of yogurt this was. Clearly, the program has some kinks to work out yet.
Thank you Richard L, for your feedback about Safeway. I was curious how good their App was a detecting the wording on a receipt. Looks like I got lucky on mine.
I’ve had the same issue as Richard L. Tried scanning receipts from FreshCo and Metro and neither product was recognized and receipts rejected. Their scan and AI technologies fail to recognize products and many grocery receipts only generically identify items so the specific brand is not acknowledged by the technology. Nor how some receipts are printed so poorly/faint the scan can’t decipher the text, I’ve had to go to AirMiles DM to get credit. Their CSAs have acknowledged the shortcomings of the technology and I get the sense that the engineers and software techs have seldom bought items at a grocery store to know all the pitfalls of mediating this promotion with the poorly designed technology!
That’s unfortunate to hear DavidB. Thanks for sharing your experience.
Just scanned a Sobeys (NS) reciept with a clearly visible product and was rejected. Created a missing airmiles claim with info about it. Hope it will be corrected..never a problem with
checkout 51.
Thanks for the feedback. I scanned one last week and it took them 4-5 days to review it manually and it went through. Hope your missing air miles claims works, as they have the ability to review the receipts manually.