Pizza in Motion has details of a short-term promotion on buying miles from American AAdvantage.
Through noon Central time on April 5, American is offering both a 30% bonus on purchased miles and a 15% discount on the purchase of those miles.
They’ll sell you up to 40,000 miles in a year, which means you net 52,000 miles, and the cost all-in is $1035.13 or 1.99 cents per mile.
The 40,000 mile limit means you can’t straight-up buy yourself a transatlantic or transpacific premium class roundtrip award. But if there’s any mile out there right now that I, for my own particular preferences, value highly it’s American miles as best-able to access international first class award seats more than a couple of weeks prior to travel.
Folks often forget that when they put spending on a rewards card that earns 1 mile per dollar, they’re really buying that mile for 2 cents, since they could be putting the spend on a Fidelity Investment Rewards American Express and earning 2 percent cash back on all spend.
Anyone putting such spend on a mileage-earning card ought to at least be on the fence about whether to buy more miles at the margin…
Agree to the .02, but most of us card freaks have no marginal spending decisions since we’re always going for the initial spend to trigger the bonus.
Agree with Ben. This is a nice offer but you’d be a fool to be spending on a 1 mile per dollar card unless it’s towards sign up bonus. When I am using a cash back card it’s either chase AARP 5% across the board or Amex blue 6% at groceries (and bus gift cards to many other places)
AARP 5% was only for 6 months, and no longer available. Any others?
if you live in canada, you can’t get 2%back.