One of the neat features of the Continental Mastercard is double mileage earning for purchases made via the Continental mall. (One of the other features is the ability to take advantage of their frequent 100 or 250 free mile signup offers, such as for reading a web page that says you can do this or that with your card.)

Flowers (and similar gift item) vendors often have some of the most lucrative mileage and cash rebate promos, since the products are fairly high margin. At times the offers through Continental are as low as 10 miles per dollar, and the offers do fluctuate.

Currently both 1800Flowers and FTD are showing up at 25 miles per dollar. Which — for folks who have a Continental Mastercard — actually yields 50 miles per dollar via the card’s ‘twice the miles’ feature for purchases made through the Continental shopping mall.

The FTD offer is even a little better than that, since it’s actually 25 miles per dollar plus 100 miles per order, all of which should be doubled.

For folks who value their Continental miles at 2 cents per dollar (admittedly a bit high unless topping off for a specific award redemption), that would mean basically buying miles at face value and getting whatever flower or gift items for just the cost of shipping.

I’ve sent some flowers and gifts this week and I admit (and even admitted to the recipients) that the 50 miles per dollar didn’t hurt in that decision.