AAdvantage Loyalty Games Fail: There’s just no Future here.

It’s been an exhilirating first month of the AA Loyalty Point Games.  We’ve seen great opportunities with offers like Winc, Spot/Tango and Verizon that have given us plenty to be happy about.  But the portal gods don’t always smile on us, despite our best efforts, planning, execution and persistence.

It Seemed Like Such a Good Deal at the Time

When we started looking through the AA Shopping Portal in earnest, Stephen noticed that Future Fitness was listed with a very worthwhile bonus of 3700 Loyalty Miles upon signing up for virtual personal training.

Now, I’m not terribly interested in virtual personal training, but 3700 is a number I can get behind.  The problem is that said trainer will cost about $300 for the two months that AA is requiring you to have it.  Luckily, our friends at American Express had a great idea:

Perfect!  AA wants us to give Future $300 and give us 3700 Loyalty Miles.  AMEX wants to give Future $300 on our behalf.  It’s the circle of life, Simba…what could go wrong?

Challenges can be…challenging

But there’s two problems:  

1. How do we redeem the AMEX offer and the AA Portal offer when both require a click-through?
2. Will the purchase amount reported to AA be $0 and, if so, will that trigger the portal bonus?

There’s only one way to find out: make the new guy do it!  So off I went.

First the double click-through issue.  This can sometimes be solved by clicking through one offer link, copying the URL from that offer, then clicking through the shopping portal and pasting the copied URL into the post-portal landing page.  So I started with the AMEX offer:

I took the URL from the landing screen, then went back through AA Portal and copied the URL onto the landing page at Future Fitness.  Here’s what I got:

Ok, so far, so good! *cracks knuckles in excitement* The AMEX offer triggered, but I’m still on the shopping visit that I initiated through the AA Portal.  I finished checking out and everything seemed to look good.  Future wanted a phone number, so I registered a Google Voice number to avoid any unwanted long-term callbacks.  There was one last hitch: Future requires that they send you an Apple Watch to “monitor” your progress (which started to feel a little creepy).  This is “free,” but they require a $199 deposit in order to send it.  Otherwise, no dice. In the interest of the public good, I went ahead and did it, but I can’t say that I felt entirely comfortable.

The moment of truth

Now comes the time for rewards…or failures.  That evening, I checked my AA Shopping account, and found this little nugget sitting there:

It worked!  Even though Future reported a $0 sale, it still triggered the portal bonus without needing to wait for 45-60 days like the terms say. I was happy as a clam and started writing the beginings of a quick deal post about the offer.  But…not so fast.  The next morning, I saw that AA had already clawed back the 3700 pending points they had given me.

That’s not the kind of rollercoaster I’m fond of.  After getting through everything, it looks like this will go down to the deal dump, with nothing to show for my effort outside of a $199 charge for a deposit on an Apple Watch I don’t want (and haven’t recieved yet).  Admittedly, there is some small chance that after 45-60 days, AA and Future get together and decide they feel differently.  However, given that the points were awarded and then clawed back, I think that’s a very small chance.

You win some, you lose some and I lost this round.  It takes a village to sort through winners and the losers and someone always has to be the guinea pig. Hopefully my loss is someone else’s gain by not having to give a second thought as to whether or not there’s a points future with Future.

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