How Dog Food Got Me Halfway to Europe

Earn Travel Points on Your Everyday Purchases

Most people are leaving hundreds—if not thousands—of travel points on the table every year without realizing it.

If you’re buying anything online—groceries, pet food, clothing, home goods—you should be starting your purchase through a shopping portal, or downloading their extension so you are reminded with a popup to activate the offer.

A shopping portal is a site or app (like Rakuten or Capital One Offers) that rewards you when you click through to a retailer before making a purchase.

Here’s a real example of how this works in practice:

I needed to restock dog food, so I searched Hill’s Science Diet Sensitive in a shopping portal. At the time, I had two options:

Rakuten was offering 10x back at Chewy

Capital One Offers had a targeted offer for 2,500 bonus miles on a $75+ purchase. In order to use the Capital One Offers portal, you must have a Capital One credit card.

You can only use one portal per purchase, so I chose the better deal—in this case, the Capital One offer.

I then paid with my Capital One Venture X card, which earns 2x miles on everything. That added another 150 miles on top of the portal bonus.

So for an everday purchase I was already going to make, I earned:

2,500 bonus miles from Capital One Shopping

150 miles from my credit card

Total: 2,650 miles from buying dog food.

If we translate that into Kristen’s “Virgin Atlantic math” (which she breaks down in detail here), that’s nearly halfway to a one-way flight to London from a single grocery-type purchase.

And that’s the key point: this isn’t about manufactured spending or complicated tricks—it’s about layering the right tools on top of everyday purchases you were already going to make. Thank you, Rover!