Miles Now Post Immediately After American Airlines Flights

My Tuesday flights already posted to my American AAdvantage account when I checked Tuesday evening. I didn’t wait until the morning to look because these flights would put me over 100,000 miles for the year.

I’ll hit $15,000 qualifying dollars soon as well (this includes qualifying dollars earned with a Barclays-issued AAdvantage card).

Other readers have confirmed that they’re also seeing miles posting right after flight. That’s new. It used to take until the next day for miles to post, and flights late in the day might take two days.

Delta and United already do this of course, but it’s notable that American has followed on this.

About Gary Leff

Gary Leff is one of the foremost experts in the field of miles, points, and frequent business travel - a topic he has covered since 2002. Co-founder of frequent flyer community InsideFlyer.com, emcee of the Freddie Awards, and named one of the "World's Top Travel Experts" by Conde' Nast Traveler (2010-Present) Gary has been a guest on most major news media, profiled in several top print publications, and published broadly on the topic of consumer loyalty. More About Gary »

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  1. Back in October I saw my first leg in a connecting itinerary post during the layover. Pretty surprised then.

  2. AA flight yesterday 8AM, still not showing in my AA account as of 4:30PM today. Your blanket statement is not applicable to everyone. Glad someone is seeing faster posting…

  3. It’s worth highlighting when competition in the airline industry actually forces people to improve their product or service, rather than a race to the bottom.

  4. How long does it take for Business AAviator EQDs to post? It didn’t post after statement end.. also confirmed with rep that I met 25k spend..

  5. I guess maximum efficiency is nice but, for 99% of travellers, who cares? The only time I ever urgently care is if I’m travelling on a single itinerary with different carriers and I’m switching my frequent flyer number in my reservation during the trip. Then I care because I want to make sure it doesn’t get screwed up — potentially permanently costing me the lost miles. It recently took about a week for my Qantas flights to post on Alaska. That seemed oddly slow.

  6. As a far as the “your mileage may vary” comments go, I had my last Thursday flights post within 5 mins of getting to the gate. Then my Sunday return flights took ~12 hours after the flights. So it might still be a bit hit or miss, but it’s damn sure faster than I’ve ever seen with AA in the past. I was watching closely because I was going to hit gold with those return flights.

  7. @ Michael — Thanks. I think my Qantas flight left LAX on Sunday night, and it seemed to take until the middle of that next week to post (I wasn’t checking every single day). I had connected from an AA domestic flight. At the boarding area for the Qantas flight, I swapped frequent flyers numbers from AA to Alaska. This will be a less useful trick beginning Jan. 1 due to Alaska giving far fewer miles for Qantas flights. For coach, I think it’s going from 200% of miles (there’s been a 2x promo this year) to 25% of miles!

  8. Mine have been posting immediately for some time now.

    Now, if only Marriott would follow suit. Points used to post the day after a stay completed but it’s now taking several days.

  9. I’ve noticed this for a few months now. It feels really inconsistent. Sometimes it happens within the hour, and sometimes I still have to wait for the next day.

    One time I had miles post before the flight completed!

  10. Two weeks ago, mine posted before I landed which meant I re-qualified for ExPlt, then 12 hours later I got an email congratulating me for becoming ConciergeKey, very nice surprise.

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