Overview

Shopping through the American Airlines AAdvantage eShopping Portal is a great way to earn extra miles from everyday shopping. They frequently run promotions where you can earn bonus miles by meeting certain minimum spend thresholds.

During their Treat Yourself Bonus Event, which runs now through January 21st you can earn 500 bonus miles if you spend $150 or a maximum of 1,000 bonus miles if you spend over $300. The bonus miles are in addition to the base miles you’ll earn from the purchases.

How to Participate

Unlike past promotions no special registration is required. You can track your progress through “My Account.” It can take up to 10-weeks for the bonus points to hit your account and in my experience it often takes the full 10-weeks.

Earnings Potential

For this example, let’s say I make a $100 purchase at 3 different retailers:

• Ray-Ban: 5 miles/$ – 500 miles
• GNC: 3 miles/$ – 300 miles
• QVC: 1 mile/$ – 100 miles
• Base miles: 900 miles
• Bonus miles: 1,000 miles
• Total miles: $1,900 miles

I hypothetically earned 1,900 American AAdvantage miles. Using The Points Guys latest valuation of American AAdvantage Miles (1.4 cents per mile) that’s a total value of $26.60, which is a 8.8% return on $300 of spend.

Your return will be higher if the retailer is offering more base miles per dollar spent and don’t forget to use your favorite points credit card for additional return.

Overall Verdict

First Class Giraffe Not Impressed

If you have any online shopping to do you should be doing it through the American Airlines AAdvantage eShopping Portal as a default so this bonus offer is just icing on the cake. The return on this deal isn’t enough for me to change my spending habits, but every mile counts.