American Airlines/AAdvantage

American Airlines Miles for Red Cross Donation

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I happen to stumble across this deal by accident when trying to search for our Hawaii fares. According to MileDonor, make a $50 donation to the American Red Cross and receive 250 miles. Make a $100 donation and earn 500 miles.

– Donations shall be made via this link on the Red Cross site.
– Promotion runs through October 31, 2011
– To earn your AAdvantage bonus miles, forward your email donation acknowledgment from the American Red Cross to ReliefMiles@aa.com. Do not to change the subject line, but do provide your AAdvantage number in the email.

Donation Process

When you get to the donation landing page, make sure to scroll all the way to the bottom and click on “Donate to Disaster Relief.”

Use your credit card to fund the donation, and you should also be pulling in an additional 50-100 miles depending on which card and denomination you choose. I can not vouch for this for sure, but if you use your American Airlines credit card to fund the donation, there is a good chance it may code as a qualifying American Airlines purchase and earn 2 miles per dollar spent.

Also, if you are looking to make a minimum spend to qualify on a bonus for a credit card, this is an excellent opportunity to help meet that limit and help a good cause.

American Airlines Shopping Portal Various Bonus Offers

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This is just a quick note about an observation I noticed this week with American Airlines. As I go through my “junk” email account that I use to sign up for any kind of offer, I noticed I received 4 different offers (one for each of us) from AAdvantage. Below is a quick summary of the differences. Note each account offered the same amount of miles with the same shopping vendors, it is just how they presented the offer, as well as bonus miles.

– My oldest son received an offer for 10 American Airlines miles per dollar spent plus 500 bonus miles when you spend $100.
– My youngest son received an offer for double American Airlines miles per dollar spent (still the same 10 miles/$) plus 500 bonus miles when you spend $100.
– My account offered 10 miles per dollar spent.
– My wife’s account offered double miles per dollar spent.

I guess I find it amusing how different the offers are worded, yet they are the same thing, minus the bonus miles that each of my son’s accounts would receive. That is definitely something I kind of enjoy while monitoring all of our accounts…how different the promotions can be for each of us. Typically, it seems my account is the one that gets screwed out of the cool promotions. All of our American Airlines accounts are the perfect example.

In order of most to least, this is how our family ranks in the number of miles in each of our accounts. Youngest son, oldest son, my wife, and then me. Keep in mind we all opened accounts at approximately the same time this year, and have never yet flown with American Airlines. Our two lucky little ones get all the cool offers or most bonus miles!

I wonder how the marketing people chose who will receive which offer? What has been your experience with differences in offers?

Mileage and Point Reward Status (August 2011)

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This is my monthly recap where I look at what reward programs we were able to add miles or points to over the previous period. Unfortunately, I was not to inspired by any of the current offers out there to open new credit cards this past month. As I mentioned previously, unless some really amazing deal comes along, I am holding out to see if I can find a great Continental Airlines offer prior to the merge. Earnings were small this month, but I am looking forward to the next month or two to see if we can rack up some hefty miles from the US Airways Grand Slam promotion. Stay tuned for future details of our progress.

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The following is a brief summary of the things we have done in the past month to build up our accounts.

Delta SkyMiles– Audience Rewards trivia questions in all three of our accounts.

United Mileage Plus- No change. My wife was invited to earn 1,000 miles for every two transactions with United Months of Miles promo. That has potential for some big runs on miles using the dining program. However, we order pictures through the United Shopping portal via Walgreens, and I have yet to receive any notification from the shopping portal on the purchase. Tracking down miles can be so frustrating. It should be a crime when these companies do not pay the miles they say they will when the customer follows the correct procedures. It has only been about two weeks though since our order, so I will follow-up with United to check on our miles.

Continental OnePass- No change, but I finally figured out where those mystery 1,000 miles came from in our accounts. A Mileathon Bonus back in April showed up. I do not remember what we did to get them, but I will take it.

US Airways Dividend Miles– Toolbar use and Audience Rewards trivia in both of our accounts. Also, I received 32 miles from what I assume is creating a Baby to Bee account via the US Airways shopping mall thanks to a tip from Million Mile Secrets. The offer showed 31 miles, but I can not figure out any other reason the miles were in my account from the shopping portal.

American Airlines AAdvantage– Like many, many other people, I took a gamble last month with the Verizon Wireless 83,000+ mile gamble for the $5 chargers. I never posted about the offer because I knew it was too good to be true, and by the time I acted, it was later in the day and every other blogger had mentioned it. Plus I figured the offer would be pulled at any moment.

The only notification I ever received from the American Airlines shopping portal was about two 500 mile new member bonuses on my wife and both my sons accounts. My account never received the new member bonus miles. As it’s been discussed all over the internet, American Airlines does not actually run their shopping mall, and neither does any other airline. It is a complete pull the wool over the consumers eyes moment. I stayed quiet on the matter and did not write about it until the dust really settled. Except, I never heard a single word from the company, Cartera Commerce, who actually runs the website. Since our purchases still never showed in our accounts, I decided to reach out to Cartera to see when the purchase will show in my account. This week I received a message that they would give us 2,500 miles for our trouble as it was an error, which everyone knew from the beginning.

I will take the 2,500 miles for our gamble, although I do not completely agree with how the situation is being handled, specifically that Cartera Commerce never bothered to notify anyone unless they specifically reached out to them. Very poor business practice, and I now second guess every purchase through these shopping portals because I seem to always have to track down where my miles are, as they never show in my account like they were supposed too.

The 2,500 bonus miles did not posted to any of our accounts in August, so look for them to show up in our September summary.

Hilton HHonors– No change.

Priority Club Rewards- No change.

Starwood Preferred Guest– We have slowly been building SPG points via the Audience Rewards broadway show trivia questions posted weekly.

Note, we also have reward accounts with AirTran, Southwest, Frontier, Choice Hotels, and Wyndham Rewards, but since we do not really use them, there is little advantage in including them in this list. I debated about including Southwest Airlines, since we do have some of the old credits from the previous Rapid Rewards program; however, after looking at what we would need to earn in the new point system to receive an award before they expire (old points still appear to expire), makes it unlikely that we will ever get anything out of the system.

What I am really trying to get at is every little bit of miles/points counts. I am surprised myself that since opening AAdvantage accounts for all of us in Feb. 2011, we have amassed 9,500 + 10,000 (future Cartera miles discussed above) miles with never setting foot on a plane. Let me know your success stories.