AA Miles - Receive 25% Bonus When You Buy 20,000

Received this email from AA this morning:

Use American Airlines AAdvantage® miles to get away this summer. If you haven't earned enough miles to reach a travel award, simply purchase the miles you need to book your retreat now. Plus, earn 25% bonus miles when you purchase a minimum of 20,000 miles through July 31, 2011.

Choose one of our most popular travel destinations with the best opportunities to use an AAdvantage MileSAAver® award at AA.com/HotSpots.

Link: https://buy.points.com/PointsPartne...ge=EN&product=BUY&CAMPAIGNCODE=AASoloDomJul11

 

Man... why are these AA promos always so terrible? I think I got spoiled by US Airways and their 75% and 100% bonus promos in the last couple of months.

With this 25% bonus you're still buying AA miles at over 2.5 CPM. 20k miles is $500 plus taxes plus a $30 transaction fee.

 

Got this too and was just coming to post it. US is in a league of their own and I love them for it.

 

Still...at 2.5 CPM and no seat time...sounds better than most mileage runs out there today!

 

These aren't status miles. Does the typical person redeem for tickets worth more than 2.5 CPM?

 

That is always my goal...I usually won't use miles unless the fare is 4.5-5 CPM or higher.

 

Assuming this was a one time offer (and possibly targeted) from US? I don't see anything on there website for bonus miles now...

 

Of course many people here can do much better. That is why I specifically asked about redemptions by a typical person.

 

That's what I was thinking... 2.5 CPM would be a wicked run, but without time on the seat you can buy tons of miles and that's all you get -- good for topping off your account for an award, but that's pretty much it.

With the US promo at least 20k would net you a 20k bonus for $550 + taxes, a little over 1 CPM. Or you could get 100k for about $1,400 and bug out and go to Paris in February if you want.

With the AA promo you can only buy 40k per calendar year, with a 10k bonus, for $1k.

 

Last day for the 100% bonus was yesterday.

 

That sucks! Paris in Feb was beginning to sound good!

 

The good thing (and bad thing) about this whole miles/points business... you have to be out there, all the time, looking for stuff.

 

You pretty much summed up my life lately!

 

Wait a few weeks/months. It will be back. US has been running deals like this regularly for the past couple of years.

And it's quite possible to score US miles for UNDER 1 cpm. The Wyndham Rewards Discover America promo was in conjunction with a 25/50/75% bonus from US for cashing in hotel points for US miles (the bonus depended on if you had a US branded credit/debit card and were Preferred elite with them). I scored miles at around .4 CPM (yes, that is not a typo, point four), and I wasn't able to max out bonuses (I have a US branded debit card, but I am not Preferred)- if you did you were getting miles at around .3 CPM.

Next up will likely be Grand Slam 2011, where US will generally have lots of ways to pile up "hits"- including hotel point transfers, hotel stays, car rentals, buying things for cheap in the mall, using points.com, and so on.

I don't have much use for US the airline but I love love love their mileage program. It's ridiculously easy to bulk up your balance for cheap, and if you can stomach fighting through their phone reps not understanding their program rules better than you do, what you can get on *A partner airlines is pretty good- plus US does run mileage sales on their Envoy to Europe in February... 60K for the same hard product as CX J (same seat manufacturer) is not bad.

 

At the risk of turning the AA forum into a platform to advertise US, I have to agree. I haven't set foot inside a US plane but in the last 2 months I've racked up 150k miles with them. Gotta love that.

 

Well, to put us back on topic, I'll note that even though the Wyndham Discover America promo was BEST for US... you COULD have turned the points bought from the promo into AA miles. At less than 1 cpm.

 

And therein lies the problem... back to my original post about AA's promos. You could have turned the WR points into AA miles, but at a significant loss compared to sending them to AA.

At the very least, if you were Joe Sixpack walking in off the street, you got 25% bonus on the transfer, and all you had to do to get a 50% bonus was walk into a Bank of America, open an account and get a US Airways branded debit card. If you were already elite then it was 75% bonus.

By comparison sending them to AA got you zilch.

 

Time out already! Did someone move the AA forum over to US when I wasn't watching?

 

Well even though some people here have loyalties towards a specific program, I don't think there's harm in discussing the differences between programs and/or alliances. MilePoint as a whole is huge, and if anything, people might actually find out about opportunities that they were not otherwise aware of.

 

Thus my attempt to get it back on track later.

No, you got AA miles at < 1 cpm. That's not zilch at all, just a less optimal exchange rate. AA's program has some features that in some ways make it superior to US's- for instance, one-way awards, the mileage-based oneworld awards (which include more stopovers than US's awards do, BTW). I could completely see someone wanting to make that tradeoff (as a matter of fact, an AA oneworld award might work well in combination with a US award). It's not just all about the mileage balances.