It’s not looking very rewarding so far, but Skiplagged now has a rewards program.

How does it work?

You sign up for an account (they give you $10 in credits to start), then you may earn travel credits by either:

1. Booking hotels or flights yourself through Skiplagged.
2. Sharing links to Skiplagged deals with your friends, who can earn you credits when they book with your link.

Sounds great, what’s the catch?

For one, Skiplagged says this: “Note: not all flights and hotels are eligible for earning travel credits.”

But there’s no note about how to know which bookings do earn credits.

Also, Skiplagged has started charging service fees when you book flights with them, which is why I only use the site to find flights, before booking them on the airline’s site.

Sometimes they charge 3.5% of your fare as a fee, and sometimes they charge other flat fees of unknown origin.

Here’s an example, with the Skiplagged fare at the top and the total fare for the same flight on Delta.com on a separate window underneath it:

So at a minimum, the Skiplagged credit you earn on a flight would need to be greater than the service fee they charge.

One issue with that: Skiplagged doesn’t tell you how much you’re going to earn before you book:

If you earned $20 in travel credit on that Delta flight above, the $5 fee would be fine. But you could be earning 20 cents or zero cents in travel credit.

I reached out to Skiplagged a couple of days ago hoping to get some answers, with no reply so far.

The other issue?

You can’t use your travel credits to make a purchase unless you have enough credits to cover the whole purchase. For example, if you want to purchase a $100 flight using your travel credits, you need to have at least $100 worth of travel credits in your account.

Here’s where I got that info from:

So why not just earn rewards on hotel bookings?  Skiplagged does not charge service fees on those.

I guess until we find out what the percentage of rewards earnings is, we won’t know if that’s an option to consider or not.

I would argue that if you’re going to sacrifice benefits by booking a hotel on a 3rd-party site, then Hotels.com is the best option, where you earn a free night after every 10 nights you stay.

I compared some Skiplagged hotel prices with the prices on Hotels.com and Booking.com, and the prices I found were about the same across all three.

Another thing that isn’t clear is whether you have to book flights directly with Skiplagged in order to earn travel credits, or if you can also earn by clicking through to other 3rd-party sites that Skiplagged sometimes directs you to.

I’m a fan of Skiplagged, so I’m hoping this program ends up being worthwhile.

If I ever get a reply to my email to Skiplagged, I’ll post an update here.

Thoughts/comments are welcome!