Now through October 8th, you can purchase AAdvantage miles with 10% off the sticker price and up to 42,500 bonus miles. Although there are plenty of other ways to earn American Airlines AAdvantage miles, let’s take a look at the deal.
How Much Are 42,500 Bonus AAdvantage Miles Worth?
I received an email from American Airlines with the subject line “Get miles + 42,500 bonus miles” and a link. Note, I had to be logged in for the page to come up, so there’s a small chance this is targeted.
In order to trigger the bonus miles, but maximize our return, we’ll want to but the lowest amount possible at each tier noted above: 20,000, 40,000, 60,000, 80,000, and 100,000 AAdavantage miles. Let’s work out the cents per mile:
- 20,000 miles and get 27,000 for $604.69 (~2.239 cents per mile)
- 40,000 miles and get 55,000 for $1,175.52 (~2.137 cents per mile)
- 60,000 miles and get 82,500 for $1,746.34 (~2.116 cents per mile)
- 80,000 miles and get 111,00 for $2,317.17 (~2.087 cents per mile)
- 100,000 miles and get 142,500 for $2,887.99 (~2.026 cents per mile)
As you can see, the cost per mile drops as you purchase more, which is typical for these kinds of promotions. Still, at over 2 cents per mile, there are a lot of other ways to build up you AAdvantage balance first. The only time I’d ever recommend buying American Airlines AAdvantage miles is…
…wait, I don’t think I would ever recommend buying these!
Comment below if you think differently, I’d be interested to hear your opinions!
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If you are short a few hundred miles for a flight wouldn’t yiu buy then?
Fair point Martin, but even then, I’d recommend just calling up American, they’ve been known to give courtesy miles to top off your account when you have a specific redemption in mind
I read some article a few days ago.
If I remember the advice correctly:
Buy Marriott BonVoy points at 30% discount.
Exchange them for AA miles at 25% bonus.
The final AA cost is about 1.8 cents/mile.
But it is still more expensive than AA’s estimate value of 1,3 cents/mile.
Buy them only if you are short a few thousands miles.