[INTERVIEW] Patrick Sojka, Founder of Rewards Canada

We continue celebrating the lead up to our 10 year anniversary later this year by interviewing a very special guest. We are honoured to feature Patrick Sojka, founder of Rewards Canada, whom we consider as the OG in the Canadian miles and points world. He is a big part of the reason why Pointshogger exists as he inspired us to start our blog to compliment his work. I am personally a huge fan of their site and continue to consult it frequently to this day. Thank you Patrick for taking the time to answer our questions today and looking forward to what you have in the works on YouTube and your Podcast!  

1) Please tell us about yourself and your role with Rewards Canada?

My name is Patrick Sojka and I am the founder of RewardsCanada.ca. For as long as I can remember I have been fascinated with flying and airplanes with a special fondness for commercial airliners! I started travelling when I was young and that led to participating in frequent flyer programs by the mid to late 80’s.

2) How and why did Rewards Canada get started?

I launched Rewards Canada in 2001 as a side project/hobby to my day job at that time. What inspired me to launch it was that there were no websites at the time that covered loyalty programs for Canadians. They were all U.S. based and even then there weren’t many of them. You had the late Tim Winship running frequentflier.com and Randy Peterson running his webflyer and FlyerTalk empire and that’s about it. Those sites were great but the content was all geared to the U.S. with virtually none of it touching upon the Canadian scene. So I thought I’d take a shot at making a site with a Canadian perspective.

3) What is Rewards Canada about?

Rewards Canada is an all encompassing loyalty rewards resource for Canadians. We provide news, tips & tricks, bonus offers as well as lessons and guides for Canadians to make the most of their loyalty programs. All types of programs are covered from airline to hotel, credit card, shopping and more. We even cover coffee and rail rewards programs, which not surprisingly have been a big source of news this year due to the VIA Rail, Starbucks and Tim Horton’s program changes.

4) What can we look forward to with Rewards Canada?

I am always looking to see how we can evolve the content we provide and how to help everyday Canadians make the most of all their reward programs. You can look forward to even more credit card reviews, credit card clashes, loyalty lessons as well as further expansion of our YouTube and Podcast content. In fact, I just launched a trial run of a weekly YouTube live session discussing the latest in loyalty programs and credit cards. It allows for viewers to participate and ask questions in the chat and have them answered right there and then.

5) As we mentioned in our recent refresh post, you are one of our inspirations to keep going the past 10 years. Do you have any thoughts for us as we embark on our next 10 years?

Keep doing what you are doing, you are one of the longest running points and miles blogs for a reason! I enjoy that you do your own thing with Pointshogger and your interview series is a great way to learn about so many companies, bloggers and websites catering to the points and miles community.