Posts Tagged With: AAdvantage

Quick Hits for the Weekend

Posted on April 12, 2015 by 2btravel

Bonus on Purchased AAdvantage Miles

American Airlines is offering bonus AAdvantage miles where the bonus amount varies depending on how many you buy or gift. If you bought the full 100,000 miles you’ll get 60,000 bonus miles for $3201.25 including taxes and fees. That works out to ~2 cents per mile which is actually about as cheap as we’ve seen American offer them for sale. On the other hand, if you’re accustomed to US Airways selling points at 1.7 cents, it’s a bit of a price hike. So it looks like the new management has decided to split the difference on the price. This is a pretty good deal if you need to top off your account for an award but not necessarily a great way to stock up on them. For other, more knowledgeable opinions, check out what Gary and Ben have to say – and if you haven’t combined your American and US Airways accounts yet, Ben makes a compelling case as to why you might like to hold off if you’re planning to buy miles.

 

Discount on Visa Gift Cards at Kroger Stores

I actually don’t get to travel a lot and accrue the majority of my points via credit card sign-ups and through manufactured spending. If you’re not familar with manufactured spending, it’s the process of using points-earning credit cards to buy products that can be quickly turned into cash. For some people this involves buying and reselling things on eBay. For others it’s buying gift cards that can be used like debit cards and loaded to one of the prepaid accounts like Amex’s Bluebird (Wal-Mart) or Target RedCard or used to buy money orders. These prepaid accounts or money orders can be used to then pay off the credit card account.

Now through April 18th, Kroger is offering an electronic coupon that will save you $5.00 when you buy two or more Visa gift cards. Kroger (and their family of stores including King Sooper, Smiths and City Market) sell Visa gift cards offered by US Bank and these cards come with a PIN so that they can be used as debit cards. The cards come in various fixed-value denominations from $25 to $100 and a variable-denomination card where you can load $20-500. There is an activation fee from (I believe) $3.95 for the cheaper, fixed-value cards up to $5.95 for the $100 card and the variable-load card.

So if you log into Kroger.com or the Kroger app and apply the coupon you can save $5.00 which will nearly cover one of the activation fees. Plus, if you use a cash-back card to purchase these gift cards, you’ll save even more.

HT: Miles To Memories on Frequent Miler

Categories: American Airlines, Manufactured Spend, Quick Hits | Tags: , , | Leave a comment

Combining AA and US Loyalty Programs: Next Steps

Posted on March 17, 2015 by 2btravel

2015-03-17 Combining AA USLast week members of American Airlines’ AAdvantage program and US Airways’ Dividend Miles program received emails regarding the progress of the airlines’ merger in regards to the loyalty programs. For awhile we’d had word that the programs would merge during the second quarter of 2015 and it appears that not only are things on track for that, but that the merger will happen in April.

If you have miles in both programs and haven’t already done so, log into either your AAdvantage or Dividend Miles account and take note of the special banner inviting you to manually combine your accounts. It’s very simple and – speaking as an IT person myself – it will help out the IT folks if you take the reins and match up your accounts yourself. For this to work properly, your name must exactly match on both accounts and I suspect your address must match exactly as well. If the account data doesn’t match sufficiently, there will be instructions on how you can get the accounts to match.

Once the merger of loyalty programs is complete, your Dividend Miles will be transferred to your AAdvantage account on a 1-to-1 basis, per the recent communication from AA/US:

Moving to the AAdvantage program

Once we combine programs, we’ll begin transferring your Dividend Miles mileage balance, Preferred-qualifying activity and million mile balance into your AAdvantage account on a one-to-one ratio. We’ll determine your elite status level by looking at your combined elite-qualifying activity for 2014, and separately, your combined 2015 year-to-date elite-qualifying activity. It may take a few days to transfer everything, but we’ll email you once it’s completed.

As a member of the most rewarding airline loyalty program, you’ll continue earning miles when you fly on American, US Airways, oneworld® and other participating airlines, as well as with over 1,000 partners. And, you’ll still be able to redeem miles for flights, upgrades on American and US Airways, car rentals, hotel stays and more.

If you want to book award travel using your Dividend Miles, do so quickly as a few days before the merger, the Dividend Miles award booking function will be disabled. This is your last chance to take advantage of some of the sweet spots of the US Airways award chart, like these top five ways described by Scott of MileValue.com.

Booking award travel

Dividend Miles award bookings and mileage upgrade requests will be disabled a few days before we combine programs to allow us to integrate your accounts. If you plan to redeem Dividend Miles for an upcoming trip, we encourage you to book now. Once our programs are combined, Dividend Miles will be converted into AAdvantage miles, and you’ll be able to redeem AAdvantage miles with American.

Change is coming and it’s good to be as prepared as we can be!

Categories: American Airlines, US Airways | Tags: , , , | Leave a comment

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