Wow, it has been 17 years of delivering bonuses!

17 years ago this month FrequentFlyerBonuses.com officially launched on the world wide web! The website came about as an offshoot from our Canadian site RewardsCanada.ca. On Rewards Canada we had (and still have) a section for bonus offers from airlines, hotels and so forth. I had noticed it was getting quite a bit of traffic from outside of Canada and with those pages only listing offers that were available to Canadians it dawned on me that I could do the same bonus offer listings but globally. And thus Frequent Flyer Bonuses was born – it was one of the Internet’s first sites (after Rewards Canada) to aggregate bonus offers and other promotions from travel programs from around the world into one location. At that time there were very few sites doing anything similar, the closest was probably Randy Peterson’s Inside Flyer who provided details on some bonuses (mostly U.S. based) and then about half a year later our biggest competitor launched, MileMaven.com, which is still live however it stopped being updated around 2012.

MileMaven wasn’t the only one who we have seen to try to do this. Other sites have come and gone who have attempted to do the same – to aggregate so many offers in one place and it’s not an easy task so I’m not surprised most have not stuck with it. We even tried to expand with UK and German sites however those were just duplicates for the most part of what we had on FFB and changes in SEO algorithms didn’t like duplicate content so we consolidated everything back into one site. And it’s not only websites/blogs that have come and gone over the 17 years but we have seen many loyalty programs come and go over that time! Here’s a screen shot of the long gone America West Flight Fund page on our site in 2006 (this page is still live btw):

It’s not just America West. The likes of Northwest World Perks,  US Airways Dividend Miles, Insel Air Star Miles and of course the legendary Starwood Preferred Guest have all disappeared. Also in that time we’ve seen so many changes in loyalty programs, gone from most are traditional award charts in favor of dynamic award pricing and any have moved to revenue based awarding of points and miles and so much more. This shift to revenue and dynamic based pricing make earning these bonuses we post about that much more valuable!

Now, 17 years later we are slowly emerging from the past two years of the pandemic which in some ways totally changed the bonus offer game. Programs looked how they could still engage consumers with no travel in place, thus we saw more bonuses that were ‘home’ based, that is bonusing things like online shopping, credit card spending and food delivery. We are slowly seeing a return of more bonus offers for hotel stays, car rentals and but mostly on credit cards. The area we haven’t seen return to pre-pandemic levels are airline bonuses. Our Route Bonus listing would at times list upwards of 700 offers in the mid 2010’s, yes, 700 bonus offers for flying around the world. Today, on February 21, 2022 that list sits at 20.

It’s been a very interesting, fun and crazy 17 years of providing our readers and subscribers with all the latest bonus offers and promotions from over 170 programs from around the world. I am looking forward to hopefully doing so for another 17 years or more if I can! Without you, the readers and subscribers we wouldn’t still be here so thank you very much for your support over these years!

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