American Airlines Still Offering Miles At 1.91 Cents Each – Don’t Buy!

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American Airlines is emailing AAdvantage members reminding them that, through 29 July the airline is still offering a bonus to anyone wishing (willing?) to purchase AAdvantage Miles ….but you should almost certainly ignore this promotion.

American Airlines is clearly relying on customers having a very bad memory or is relying on blogs like this one not to point out how this compares to the promotion American was running just a few weeks ago.

Here’s how the two promotions compare:

The table on the left shows the promotion that ran up until 8 July while the table on the right shows the current promotion.

As you can see, American hasn’t exactly been innovative with this current offer…in fact all that the airline has done is remove the 10% discount and make the offer worse!

Amusingly, the airline still hasn’t changed the terms and conditions from the last promotion so the narrative still shows the old end date and still mentions the now non-existent discount.

Nice to see the airline putting so much thought into their offers! 🙂

How The Math Works Out

Someone purchasing the full allowable amount (150,000 AAdvantage Miles)  would end up with 250,000 AAdvantage Miles (including bonus) at a cost of $4,786.88….

…which comes to 1.91 cents per AAdvantage Mile.

That’s $475 more (0.19 cents/mile more) than the same number of miles would have cost at the beginning of the month.

In case anyone is in desperate need of a few more AAdvantage miles I should point out that you need to be very aware how the tiering actually works.

Within each tier you get the same number of bonus miles whether you buy at the top end of the range or towards the bottom end so the better value is at the lower end of the tier.

For example:

Someone buying 149,000 miles (top of the tier) would get a bonus of 70,000 miles and end up with 229,000 miles at a cost of $4,755.16 or 2.08 cents per mile. But, if the same person was to buy 126,000 miles (bottom of the tier), they’d still get a bonus of 70,000 miles (giving them a total of 196,000 miles) at a cost of $4,025.78 or 2.05 cents per mile. Not exactly a life changing difference..but it’s still a difference none the less.

Should You Buy AAdvantage Miles?

Like I’ve already said, almost certainly not.

Sure, if you need a few thousand miles to top an account for an award there’s no harm in that but we already know that American is prepared to discount its currency down to 1.72 cents/mile so why buy at this price if you don’t have to.

Yes, you could argue that we don’t know when or if American will sell miles as low as 1.72 cents again….but we know that AAdvantage miles were available at around 1.8 cents each back in April and December so 1.91 is still not a good deal.

I listed out all my reasons for not buying AAdvantage Miles at 1.72 cents each last month (so I’m not going to go over those again) but I honestly don’t think this a deal that the vast majority of travelers should be considering,,,,the value just isn’t there.

If You Absolutely Have To Buy….

If you really can’t stop yourself from buying AAdvantage miles in this promotion then at least make sure you earn some bonus miles into the bargain.

American Airlines processes its own miles transactions (not Points.com) which means that the purchase of miles will be treated as a travel/airline purchase by the credit card companies….so make sure you use a credit card that offers bonus points for purchases in those categories.

Examples:

• Citi Prestige Credit Card – 3 ThankYou points/$ spent
• Citi ThankYou Premier Credit Card – 3 ThankYou points/$ spent
• American Express Premier Rewards Gold Card  – 3 Membership Rewards points/$ spent
• Chase Sapphire Preferred Card – 2 Ultimate Rewards points/$ spent

Bottom Line

You really need to have clear and present reason to buy AAdvantage Miles in this promotion as I can’t think of a single non-pressing reason why it may be a good idea (but please let me know in the comments if you can think of one).

History tells us that American will offer up yet another promotion in a few weeks time (I’ll guess somewhere around the end of August) and it could well be better than this one…and if it isn’t then there will be another promotion after that which probably will be 🙂