7,500 bonus miles. Here’s an idea to do even better…

18

Valid through: December 20, 2014

If you belong to the American Airlines AAdvantage Dining program, you may have received an email with a subject heading like this:

Greg, We Have Your 7,500 AAdvantage Bonus Miles

(Note that your email might have your first name rather than mine)

This is a targeted offer that requires 10 dines of $40 or more (plus review each one) before December 20th.  If you can’t find the email, it can’t hurt to try to register through this link.

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Wondering about Small Business Saturday… (see Update below)

The above deal, in itself, sounds to me like too much work and expense for too little reward.  What if we can combine it, though, with Small Business Saturday (details here) where we can get back $10 for each $10 purchase at a local business on Saturday November 29th?  Would it be worth loading your account with Amex card numbers and then buying multiple $40 gift cards on that day?

Since each Amex card can qualify for Small Business Saturday for up to 3 purchases, it would only be necessary to load 4 cards to your Dining account to make this work.  On Small Business Saturday, buy a total of 10 $40 gift cards at a restaurant that qualifies as a small business and is listed as a qualifying restaurant for the AAdvantage Dining program.  Each gift card would have to be bought as a separate transaction.  And, you would have to make sure to use each Amex card no more than 3 times.

If this works, you would get $10 back for each $40 gift card purchased and you would get both the regular AAdvantage Dining program miles and the 7,500 bonus miles.

Let’s say you earn 5 miles per dollar from the dining program, then:

  • Total gift card value: $400
  • Total cost to you: $300 (after Small Business Saturday rebates)
  • Credit card miles earned: 300 (assuming 1 mile per dollar)
  • Regular dining miles earned: 5 X 400 = 2000
  • Bonus miles earned: 7,500
  • Total miles earned: 9800
  • Miles earned per dollar: 32.7

That seems like a pretty good deal!

Caution!

I don’t know if the above idea would work!  The entire idea is contingent upon earning dining miles from buying restaurant gift cards rather than from dining at the restaurant.  It seems likely to me that it would work, but I don’t have evidence.  Please comment below if you have tried anything similar.

UPDATE: Never mind!

I just read through the terms & conditions more carefully and found this:

Limit of one bonus qualifying visit per restaurant per day

Doh!  This means that we can’t combine this with Small Business Saturday as described above.  Oh well!

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