If there’s one mileage-earning opportunity that travelers routinely overlook, it’s shopping at the airlines’ online mileage malls. The prices are the same. And by making your purchases through the airline’s portal, you’ll be earning miles—typically between one and 10 miles per $1 spent—that you don’t get when dealing direct through the merchant.
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Making a good deal even better are the periodic bonus promotions, like this one, that amp up the mileage-earning. Those promotions generally proliferate around Christmas and other heavy-buying periods, although recently the airlines have used back-to-school shopping and other recurring events as the hook to hang their promotions on. And sometimes, they’re out of the blue.
Bottom line: If you’re going to be shopping online anyway, it always makes sense to do so through an airline’s mileage portal, to earn miles for the purchases. And when there are extra bonuses in place, it makes even more sense.
Offer Details
Through March 17, AAdvantage members can earn bonus miles for purchases made through the AAdvantage eShopping portal at any of 850 merchants:
- 300 bonus miles after spending $150
- 1,000 bonus miles after spending $350
As always, when shopping via an airline’s mileage mall, you must first stop at the mall’s landing page to log in with your loyalty-program credentials. Thereafter, purchases at any of the mall’s hundreds of participating merchants can be tracked and credited to your account.
Deal or No Deal
As shopping bonuses go, this one is decent if not world-changing.
But again, if you’re going to be shopping anyway, there’s no reason not to earn the base miles; and the bonus miles are just that: a bonus.
Reader Reality Check
You do earn miles when shopping online, don’t you?
After 20 years working in the travel industry, and almost that long writing about it, Tim Winship knows a thing or two about travel. Follow him on Twitter @twinship.
This article first appeared on SmarterTravel.com, where Tim is Editor-at-Large.
