Free Hawaiian Miles | How Far Are You Willing To Go This Time

When this program first started a few years ago, we were excited to see a new opportunity to earn Hawaiian Miles. If you’re Hawaii-centric, like we are, these come in very handy for things like:

• Inter-Island and Mainland flights
• Mileage upgrades to Extra Comfort premium economy and business/first class

We aren’t sure what happened to the program, but today we received an email invitation to join it once again. Hawaiian Airlines partnered with a company called SSI and created a program, Opinions Take Flight, in which members earn award miles by taking part in surveys.

350 Hawaiian Miles in exchange for your first survey?

The press release indicated that the initial reward for signing up was 350 Hawaiian Miles. Not bad – that’s worth $3.50 in an honest evaluation of what miles are worth nowadays – one cent each.

Although we had signed up for the program when it launched five years ago, we needed to start the process again today. The signup itself was simple and straightforward this time, whereas last time, it included a series of many questions including some quite personal. As we later learned, this initial survey was used in part to determine how many miles we’d receive for future surveys.

Today’s first survey took a total of about 5 minutes, which is equivalent to $14/hour. Fair enough, we weren’t expecting to get rich on this. Questions started with what kind of insurance policies we had, what kind of bank accounts, and about home ownership.

Did we get our 350 miles? Other gotchas and what you told us.

To be honest, we aren’t sure after completing the questions the screen below appeared, without ever even acknowledging we had completed the survey. When we checked our account profile there was no history of having completed the 350 mile survey at all. For sure, it wasn’t worth it proceeding after that, for either the 30 miles or the 5 miles in the event we didn’t qualify. Spending nearly a half hour for 30 miles is equivalent to earning sixty cents per hour.

Read Chuck shared his thoughts with us: “I too tried “Opinions Take Flight” and had similar experiences, and frankly, worse. Surveys often took far longer than predicted, and very very often I was booted out of the survey as it was “not for me.” Okay, but in the run-up to each survey, I am always asked a series of questions about features of my assets, interests, jobs, health, medical conditions, etc., which lead me to suspect that I am being profiled to accumulate personal information (medical history, etc., etc.) in far more detail than is being disclosed… 5+ hours all told, in order to collect far fewer than 300 points. That’s like 60 cents an hour, isn’t it? This has been an unsatisfactory experience, and I wouldn’t recommend it to others.”

Gio told us: “The 350 miles was about all that was worth it for me, I noticed that once you hit the 350 miles that it lowers the miles down to 60 or 50 miles per survey. The only problem with that for me was that the surveys increased in time it took. The 350 mile survey was a 15min survey and then the 60mile survey said that it would take 30mins. I think it is worth it to get the 350 miles however I probably wont be taking any more. Interesting reading about your experience with it. Thanks for the share!”

In the end, we aren’t likely to keep going with this. What about you?

Note that Award miles will be directly deposited into your Hawaiian Miles account and can then be redeemed for air travel, car rentals, hotel stays, and shopping. We’ll see if the 350 promised miles ever show up and will let you know.