A quick travel recommendation

If you are planning to book travel in the future through a website like Hotels.com or Expedia, you might want to try running the transaction through Ebates first.

As you probably know, Ebates is a website that purportedly sends you “big fat checks” for spending money online through the retailers affiliated with it. I will say that it absolutely does work, but to get the $900 checks they talk about on television commercials you’d definitely have to be spending a lot of money. As you’ll see below, for smaller purchases (like the $30 I spent at Bed, Bath and Beyond) your “cash back” can end up being less than a dollar — so obviously it can take a while to build up.

However, travel is one category where I’ve found it can actually add up a fair bit. I booked our 11-day stay in a Bloomington hotel through Hotels.com (in order to build up to the ‘stay 10 nights, get one free’ benefit — which I just used today to book at hotel in Rome, actually) but started by going to Ebates.com to check on the available offer. Right now it is 3 percent cash back, but I believe it was 6 percent cash back when I used it. At any rate, I’m now getting $111.99 back via PayPal. Given that I had completely forgotten about it, it was certainly a nice surprise!

Not pictured: an additional $38.20 that posted later than the others. I booked our stay at the hotel in various phases (for a variety of boring, unimportant reasons) which is why there a several different ones.