The deal of the year allowed you to buy American AAdvantage miles for less than half a cent apiece, which is unprecedented – taking advantage of an opportunity to earn 40 miles per dollar on a donation to Conservation International through Mastercard, combined with an end of year quintuple miles bonus – together that meant earning 240 miles per dollar spent. See this post for full details.

The offer was through SimplyMiles, an often-stackable way to earn American AAdvantage miles while paying for purchases with a Mastercard. And many people haven’t paid enough attention to it until this offer. There are two reasons it’s been under-covered.

• SimplyMiles rolled out fully shortly before the pandemic. That may have caused it to gain less traction.

• It seems the best offers don’t populate when you first sign up for the program. It can take a day or two. Sign up, link a Mastercard (or three), and you may see twice as many offers a day or two later. This is the opposite of best practice since you want customers to see the best offers and encourage engagement right away, when they’re first paying attention to a program, in order to excite them when they’re paying attention. Most people won’t come back otherwise.

So the 5 times the usual miles as a bonus on top of regular mileage earning is actually smart. For American it’s even smarter because they were getting money from Mastercard to run it. This deal makes the site and its offers really focal.

It’s easy to skip over other offers on the site because this one was so good. Against a baseline of earning up to millions of miles at an unprecedentedly low price, it’s hard to get excited about the rest of the offers on the site. But that’s probably a mistake because there are some really great offers for things you might do anyway and why leave free miles on the table?

Here are some of other things that were available, insane with the bonus:

• Under this promotion you actually earned 9000 miles (1500 x 6)
  
• I value that at $117, a 260% return on your money (plus getting whatever you’re buying at CVS)
  
• This worked online, even, you don’t even need to go to a CVS store
  
• You could even buy a $50 gift card at CVS! to use later
  
• The offer could be used twice on two separate transactions

Some other worthwhile offers I saw,

• 12,500 miles (with bonus) on Best Buy purchase of $200+
  
• 8370 miles (with bonus) on Shiseido purchase of $150+
  
• 6000 miles (with bonus) on Winc purchase of $30+
  
• 18 miles per dollar (with bonus) on American Airlines Vacations $1000+ purchase, which itself earns miles
  
• 138 miles per dollar (with bonus) on MovieClub purchase of $8.99+ ($0.0072 per mile)
  
• 2790 miles (with bonus) on Barnes & Noble purchase of $30 (miles that may be worth more than the spend)
  
• 30 miles per dollar (with bonus) on GoPuff – link a Chase Mastercard that includes statement credits and this could be free miles
  
• 12,500 miles (with bonus) on Vinesse purchase of $41+ (miles that may be worth well more than the spend)
  
• 8400 miles (with bonus) on Wine.com purchase of $100+

That just names a few. If you were going to buy from Wine.com or CVS anyway these are incredible deals, and maybe worth doing even if you weren’t going to. MovieClub was profitable on its own, but the charity offer if you had it was more lucrative and you probably didn’t want the MovieClub product. Vinesse wines are terrible (in my experience) but again miles worth more than the purchase price. Barnes & Noble effectively got you a rebate of the full value of a book (or other) purchase in the form of miles. And this isn’t the first time they ran a sextuple miles offer, they did it at the end of 2019 also.

All of which is to say this bonus highlights SimplyMiles and makes it something worth checking more often than I would have before.