(EXPIRED) AA SimplyMiles: Earn 3x AAdvantage Miles Per Dollar On IHG Reservations

The American Airlines SimplyMiles card-linked program has a great new offer available if you have an IHG stay coming up in the next six weeks. They’re offering 3 miles per dollar spent at IHG properties when paying with a Mastercard linked to your SimplyMiles account which is great seeing as IHG credit cards are Mastercards. Even better, this will stack with portal cashback and IHG’s latest promotion, making any upcoming stay particularly rewarding.

The Deal

• Earn 3x AAdvantage miles per dollar when paying for an IHG stay with a card linked in the SimplyMiles program.
• Direct link to offer.

Key Terms

• Expires April 30, 2020.
• You’ll earn 3 miles for each $1 spent on purchases made at InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG) properties in the U.S. when booking online.

Quick Thoughts

This is a sweet deal due to the nature of how SimplyMiles works. It’s a card-linked program, so paying for your IHG stay with a Mastercard linked to your SimplyMiles account after you’ve added this offer to your card won’t interfere with other rewards. For example, if you pay with an IHG Premier card (which is a Mastercard), you’ll still earn 10x IHG Rewards Club points per dollar for your stay. You’ll also earn 3x on the total including tax, rather than the pre-tax amount which is how IHG’s promotions and portal cashback calculates things.

You’ll also earn bonus points from IHG’s latest promotion which offers up to 4x points, plus you can earn cashback through a shopping portal seeing as SimplyMiles isn’t a shopping portal itself.

One thing to note is that I think you can only use this offer once, unless SimplyMiles makes it available to you again after redeeming it the first time. It’s therefore best to only load the offer to your account before your most expensive stay if you’ll be staying more than once before April 30, 2020.

This latter point is actually applicable to us right now. I’m writing this from the lobby of a Holiday Inn Express, with the stay costing us something like $400. If I loaded the offer to my wife’s SimplyMiles account right now (as we’re paying with her IHG Premier card as it’s currently earning 25x rather than the standard 10x), we’d earn 1,200 AAdvantage miles. That’s not bad, but we have a much better option.

COVID-19 has thrown a wrench in the works for our road trip plans for the next couple of months. My parents were due to fly in from the UK to join us on our road trip for 6.5 weeks, but we’ve had to cancel that now (we actually decided that for ourselves literally two minutes before the ban on UK citizens was announced). We’re therefore postponing all the things we had planned to visit with them (Utah’s National Parks, the Grand Canyon, Colorado Springs & more). Shae and I are therefore going to hole up in New Mexico for a few weeks to socially distance ourselves as best as possible and are staying at a Candlewood Suites – one of IHG’s brands.

We found a great rate that’s only something like $60 per night, but it means our final bill will come to ~$1,500. Waiting to load the SimplyMiles offer until after we’ve checked out of our hotel in Henderson means we’ll earn ~4,500 AAdvantage miles rather than 1,200. That’s a great – and unexpected – bonus, so I just hope American Airlines lasts long enough for that to be worth it.

One additional thing to note is that the terms state that the offer is valid on stays in the US that are booked online. I can certainly see the US-based part of that being true, but I’m curious how they’d know if you’re paying for a stay that was booked online versus booked in person or over the phone. Still, it’s generally better to book online anyway seeing as you can then earn portal cashback.

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