Miles Aren’t a Girl’s Only Best Friend
One of my favorite blogs, View from the Wing, recently did a round up of the best mileage offers for flowers.
Teleflora was left in the dust by the 40 Delta miles per dollar at 1-800-Flowers and the 30 miles per dollar for multiple airlines offered by FTD. But choosing your florist based only on miles may not be the best option, particularly for a floral-based holiday like Valentine’s Day.
Since I love flowers more than any other gift I could possibly receive, I’ve had my fair share of deliveries.
- 1-800-Flowers is best at themed arrangements. If you want to send someone a floral cake, martini, or mug of beer, they’re great. The rest of the flowers are fine, but the customer service is extremely inconsistent. They’ve ruined two Valentine days in the past by messing up the delivery dates and then trying to avoid responsibility. Occasionally other deliveries have shown up with radically different flowers or broken vases, which they were better about fixing.
- FTD is really solid. Their florist delivered flowers stay true to the website images and last awhile. I’m most impressed by their shipped flowers. Even coming in a box, they’re really well arranged and typically last the guaranteed 7 days or more. And if the recipient already has umpteen zillion vases like me, sending without a vase really cuts costs.
- Teleflora is my all time favorite. They’re not cheap but there’s an artistic quality to their arrangements that no other company can achieve. They’re not only the most beautiful flowers I’ve received, but they use a wide variety of blooms. It’s always fun to get flowers that you don’t recognize/can’t pronounce. Teleflora also offers an amazing selection of vases, worth keeping and displaying for their own sake.
- Proflowers rarely offers competitive mileage deals, but if you’re price sensitive, they offer no-frills high quality blooms. I’ve found they do best at a single variety bouquets, particularly orchids and Gerbera daisies.
If you’re looking to make a grand gesture, RoseSource.com, is an inexpensive way to send 100+ roses. For non-holidays, 100 long stem roses start at $119 with free shipping. A few notes: vases are not included and the flowers arrive well wrapped and will need to be cut and arranged. This can take several hours. One 300 rose delivery took me 7 hours of tracking down vases and hacking through all the stems.
