SimplyMiles is the new American Airlines in-store mileage earning shopping program. Online shopping portals reward you for online shopping. Those are usually outsourced to third parties like Cartera Commerce or Collinson Group (which owns Priority Pass).
United’s unique meatspace mechanism to direct your shopping and earn miles in exchange is the MileagePlus X app, which essentially buys and redeems gift cards for your purchase. American though has a new program, SimplyMiles, which works similar to Rewards Network dining and ThankYou Rewards shopping, you register a credit card and they scan your transactions for eligible spend.
The only initial problem is that they sent out an email to their member file, and their website went down. Oops.
I finally got the site to load – intermittently and slowly.
- You register for SimplyMiles with your AAdvantage account.
- Currently you can only use SimplyMiles with an AAdvantage co-brand credit card though they say “We’ll be adding more options in the near future.”
Offers are targeted and you have to activate them to earn miles from them. They don’t want to give you miles you didn’t realize you’d be entitled to.
My account had 29 offers available to me including Olive Garden; ExxonMobile; American Airlines (bonus miles ona $3000+ purchase); Teleflora and others. I found the offers difficult to read since they use brand logo fonts, some of which are too small in the format shown.
American trademarked SimplyMiles last summer, they should be able to create a more seamless experience. Even though your AAdvantage number and password are your login for SimplyMiles, they still make you register with the site (using those credentials). Moreover since the program is limited to co-brand credit card customers, they shouldn’t need customers to add their cards to the program they should seamlessly integrate with their partners. Presumably the lawyers are insisting on these extra steps for transaction-level data-sharing.
It also seems like they’d want to juice the offers a bit at launch to get customers excited about and adopting the new platform.
Still it’s nice to see more opportunities to earn miles, now with American AAdvantage for in-store activity. Some of course won’t be pleased giving over their transaction data to American Airlines while others may be surprised that American isn’t already getting it at the level needed to pull this off from their co-brand partners.
The starting offers are weak, very weak.
May have been different for you but the AA one I got was for a single $3,000 purchase through AA Vacations.
“United’s meatspace mechanism to direct your shopping and earn miles in exchange is the MileagePlus X app”
Huh? MileagePlus Shopping has its own in-store section, running on the same backend as Rakuten’s.
FWIW, my company’s firewall blocked the site as malware. YMMV.
A good heads up for a pretty obscure program but, jeez, the offers are lame. The only one I could imagine anyone caring about is the Exxon offer giving you a mile for every dollar spent. The Citi Premier card is a Mastercard, so if you already use that one to buy gas at Exxon (it pays 3x at gas stations) you might as well link it to a SimplyMiles account. Still, unless somebody somehow buys gift cards at Exxon, we’re talking pocket change.