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Update 12/23/19: My initial assessment of how the 5x is calculated for fixed-rate bonuses was incorrect – it turns out this promotion is much more rewarding than I’d been expecting.
I spent $200+ at Best Buy a couple of times recently with a Mastercard that I’d linked to the SimplyMiles program as I had two Best Buy offers – one for 1,000 bonus miles and one for 750 bonus miles. The 5x quintupled both those amounts and were awarded separately to each of those bonuses, effectively sextupling them.
As you can see, for my first transaction on December 17 I earned a total of 4,500 miles, then earned 6,000 miles when spending $200 a couple of days later. That’s 30x for in-store Best Buy purchases on the latter transaction which is amazing.
That makes the Wag promotion mentioned below even better. Rather than earning 2,050 miles like I originally thought, you’d actually earn 12,000 AAdvantage miles on only $9.99 of spend.
As John points out in the comments below, that opens up other opportunities like the BJ’s membership offer. Buying a $55 Inner Circle membership netted him 15,000 bonus miles, while there are other similar opportunities.
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American Airlines launched SimplyMiles a couple of months ago, a card-linked program that offers bonus AAdvantage miles when spending at select retailers in a similar way to how Amex Offers, Chase Offers, etc. work.
They’ve launched a new promotion that’s offering 5x bonus American Airlines AAdvantage miles for all offers listed on SimplyMiles until December 31, 2019, thereby enhancing all their existing offers.
The Deal
- Earn 5x bonus AAdvantage miles for all offers on SimplyMiles.
- Direct link to offer.
Key Terms
- Expires December 31, 2019.
Quick Thoughts
I took a look at SimplyMiles when it first launched and then again a few weeks ago, but have largely ignored the program since then as none of the offers were helpful at the time.
Doctor of Credit wrote about this promotion yesterday which prompted me to take a look at it again and I’m liking it a little more now as SimplyMiles appears to have added some new deals.
For example, my account has an offer for 1,000 bonus miles when spending $200 at Best Buy. That’s 5x miles per dollar if spending exactly $200 which would be doubled to 10x with this new promotion. For an in-store offer for Best Buy, that’s excellent. It can be even better if you link a Citi Dividend card to SimplyMiles as that’s offering 5% cashback at Best Buy until the end of the year. Spending exactly $200 would therefore net you 2,000 AAdvantage miles and $10 – a pretty good return considering many people will be buying stuff at Best Buy for the holidays.
Be sure to pay attention to the terms of each individual offer though. For example, the BJ’s offer shown in the image above simply says ‘Earn 2,500 miles on a purchase of $55 or more’. Clicking on the offer itself though lists a pretty important requirement – this is only valid when buying a BJ’s Inner Circle membership.
SimplyMiles could also be an opportunity to buy miles on the cheap. For example, one of my offers is for Wag (the pet walking service, not Wag.com which was bought by Amazon).
As you can see, that offers 2,000 miles when spending $9.99. If you can find a dog walker that charges exactly $9.99, you’d earn 2,050 miles when taking into account the 50 bonus miles you’ll earn from this 5x promotion. That’s like buying American Airlines AAdvantage miles for 0.49cpp which is a great deal if it tracks properly, albeit for only a relatively small number of miles.
One thing to add is that the SimplyMiles website is horrible. For starters, it only loads 12 offers at a time, so you have to keep scrolling down and hitting ‘View More Personalized Offers’ for every new set of 12 offers.
It also takes forever to load an offer to your card, if it even works. I spent a good 10 minutes trying to add a handful of offers to my cards because clicking the ‘Add To Card’ button seemed to do nothing. I’d therefore refresh the page and have to rescroll through all the offers again. If you have the patience for that, this 5x promotion could be nice and rewarding.
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I have noticed some recent shady business with SimplyMiles, though I have not actually tested anything yet.
Specifically from this week:
* Monday (and prior days) I had 101 offers, some of which presented double-dip opportunities. I had 2 CVS offers, both activated on my account, both expiring Feb 29, one for 1000 miles on $45 purchase, one for 250 miles on $45 purchase.
* Wednesday (yesterday): I logged in and only had ~50 offers (exact number is in a file at home) and the bigger CVS offer was gone (along with a bunch more). Based on expiration dates, only 1 offer should have “fallen off”. I did not do a thorough check of what else fell off, but I could if I really needed to.
* Thursday (today): I have 68 offers including both CVS offers, already activated. Again, I have not checked what else changed from the beginning of the week.
* At some point (I forget exactly when): I remember seeing CVS info for “3.5-miles per $1 spent”, at least in the actual embedded HTML (perhaps not visible on the page). I would have to look at files that are not here with me to maybe figure out when/where.
There is also a double-dip possibility with Walgreens on my account: 150 miles for $35 spend, 500 miles for $35 spend, both expire Feb 29, both already activated. Note, however, that earlier in the week I had 2 different Walgreens offers: 250 miles on $75 spend expiring Feb 16, and 2.5 miles per $1 expiring Dec 31. I admit to paying closer attention to CVS than Walgreens, so I am not as confident about all the history of those Walgreens offers.
Has anyone tried any of these double-dips (I happen to have a Chase offer on my IHG card for CVS for a possible triple-stack) and has it tracked?
In case you are wondering, here is some of the geekery background to part of this story: I am convinced I need to become competent in Python (i.e. I have never used it before and I need to now) so I decided automating the tracking of some of these “offers” was a good exercise. I started with SimpleMiles because it looks easiest, not because it is the most useful. Right now I still need to manually copy/paste the html of the SimplyMiles home/offer page to a file to be processed into a spreadsheet output (let me know if you want to view the output), though eventually I may try to learn how to automate the actually logging-in and scraping of data from the site. I will probably look at Amex offers before that though, because that would be a lot more useful across 2 business accounts, 3 personal accounts, and 2 AUs on most of those, and the added complication of 1 offer per SSN. And FWIW, I am aware of and have used karwosts’ Javascript/Nightmare approach (on GitHub), though it leaves a lot to be desired for my use case with all the different cards and users. And my Javascript expertise is only slightly higher than my python from a couple weeks ago – i.e. close to nada – though not as close as my Nightmare expertise which is completely nada.
Duplicate offers don’t stack unfortunately – it only rewards you for one. I think it/s based on whichever offer you loaded to the card first, but I’m not 100% certain about that. Like you mentioned though, the CVS one should stack with the Chase Offer.
Thanks for the info, I can respect their decision to not allow double-dips, but I do not like the way they are doing it. Not only can I easily activate both without any shenanigans, but both still show up as activated, the offers seems to change in the background willy nilly, and it is not obvious which offer will trigger at any point in time. Oh well, maybe they will get it figured out in the future. I will still occasionally look to add any semi-attractive offers just in case I stumble onto a situation in which I use an offer, but I will not proactively look to make any decisions based on those offers.
Looks like the promotion ended prematurely on Dec 27 instead of Dec 31 as originally advertised…
Well that sucks. I just made a couple of promotional purchases today!
The holiday bonus (earn an additional 5x AAdvantage miles) promotion has ended. Purchases made after 12pm PT on December 27, 2019 no longer qualify for the 5x holiday bonus. We hope you continue enjoying earning miles with participating merchants in SimplyMiles.
I wonder if they made a mistake with how the 5x promo worked and so killed the deal early.
I was just looking at my AA balance today (for other reasons) and saw that I got the 5x bonus on Wag despite making my purchase after the 5x had ended. I made the purchase on Dec 28 but it hit my account sometime in the last 5 days. I know the 5x had already ended when I made the purchase because I remember finding out about it after the fact … but the 2K miles from Wag for a $10 purchase still seemed worth doing. Instead they gave me 12K total (2K + 5 x 2K). So if anyone made any purchases shortly after the 5x seemingly ended, take another look at your statement as you may have actually received the bonus.
Just an FYI, the 4yourhealth offer will not end up earning the 5x bonus, because your free membership lasts for the first 14 days, which will bring you past 12/31. So your enrolled card will only be charged after that. And to add insult to injury, you only earn miles on a purchase of $15.00 or more. Monthly membership is $14.95. So unless you live in a state that requires they charge a sales tax, you won’t get the simplymiles bonus until they charge the 2nd months $14.95 fee.
Isn’t Dividend only 5% at Best Buy until the end of your December billing cycle – not the end of the year?
My understanding is that it’s September 1 to December 31.
Unless it has changed, see Cashback Rollover section:
https://milestomemories.boardingarea.com/citi-dividend-rotating-categories-2019/
The wording on that MtM post certainly makes it sound like that could be an issue for some, but when looking for more about Cashback Rollover elsewhere (including on Citi’s site) I couldn’t find anything about it.
Thankfully it won’t affect me though anyway as my statement closed a couple of days after all my transactions posted, so I was credited 5% for all the transactions. Thanks for the heads up about that though 🙂
Is there a way to join with any Mastercard if you don’t have an AA card? I’m not able to
I don’t think so unfortunately as my wife wasn’t able to register in the end.
Yeah, my offers were no where as good as yours, Stephen. My BB offer was only for 250 miles for $200 spend. Even at 5x, that’s 1,250 AA miles compared to your 5,000. Big difference. I didn’t even get a Wag or BJ’s offer. The only offer that was for 1,000 miles or more to be meaningful at 5x was an offer for Soothe for 1,000 miles (becomes 5,000 at 5x) with $120 spend. Very disappointing.
This could really open up some stacking opportunities. I currently have an offer for 5x TYP on my Premier on Department Stores. I have a JCPenneys SimplyMiles offer for 1x, which by your recent experiences should get 6x AA miles. Dosh has an instore offer for 10% back at JCP, and Rakuten has a 4x instore offer for JCP. If all 4 stacked, that would be crazy.
Middle Age Miles had a post recently about buying Amazon gift cards there–I might give it a try.
You guys stole all the GOOD offers, lol. No beans for me except if I booked an AA vacation I could get 15 miles per $ if over $3000.
I just joined, but I don’t seem to have the Wag or BJ’s offer. Only the bestbuy offer (among the ones you mention). The offers must be unique to each user?
Yep, that seems to be the case.
I can now confirm that NK3’s understanding of how this promotion works is actually correct.
On December 18, I purchased a BJ’s membership for $55+tax. My simplymiles account is now showing 15,000 miles earned (2,500 + (5 * 2500)). The base 2,500 miles have already posted to my AAdvantage account, and I would expect the additional 12,500 to post eventually (perhaps after the promotion ends).
So, you actually earn 6x (base + 5x bonus) whatever the offer says. This is an incredible deal – please update your analysis.
Yep, I noticed that on my own account just before I went to bed last night. Thanks for the additional data point – I’ll update the post.
@John, I’m digging up an old thread here, but do you know when the 5x posted to your AAdvantage account and whether they were backdated to your purchase date of 12/18 or whether they were dated whenever they posted to your AAdvantage account?
Nick,
You just got in under the wire – AAdvantage only shows activity back 2 years.
Anyway, I can confirm that the miles were backdated to December 18th (date of purchase), but I cant’t tell you when they actually showed up. If you can see the actual date of my comment above (it only shows “1 year ago” for me), that would be the day the bonus posted to my SimplyMiles account, but I can’t see the date they would have posted to my AAdvantage account. I suggest that you have people check their SimplyMiles account rather than their AAdvanatge account account if they’re waiting on their bonus miles.
Tried to add Amex card and it says card# needs to be 16 digits
Yep, SimplyMiles is only for Mastercards at the moment.
I guess I was reading this a little differently. So it says “earn an additional 5x AAdvantage miles on every offer on SimplyMiles.” So if you get 2000 miles for spending $9.99 at Wag, I thought it meant you got 5x 2000 miles, or 10000 miles. For that specific deal, it would be incredible (so maybe I am wrong?). But you can add and use these on non AA mastercards, which makes me think the 5x multiplier is to the deal itself, not the baseline AA card earnings.
My Best Buy offer is only 250 for $200 spend, so I guess these are targeted at different levels.
As an aside, if we add multiple Mastercards to website, the offers work on any of the cards we use, correct?
I think they’ve worded it as 5x as most offers are based on earning x miles per dollar, so the 5x is in addition to that, rather than simply multiplying your earnings by 5. If you did get 10,000 miles for $9.99 that’d be an incredible deal, but highly unlikely.
I also had the same Best Buy offer you had, so I’m waiting to see if I’ll be awarded both bonuses or only one when I go to Best Buy tonight or tomorrow.
With regards to adding multiple Mastercards, I’m assuming it’ll work on any of the cards as you load the offer to your SimplyMiles account rather than specifically to the card(s) themselves. I imagine you’ll only get one bonus though, rather than being able to get the same bonus on each card. Again, that’s speculation though as I’ve not actually used the program so far.
As per John’s comment below, your assessment was correct and the 5x on fixed bonuses is indeed an incredible value!
Great!
How soon do you usually see the transaction show up on SimplyMiles website, and then in your AA account? Just did a purchase at Best Buy last night, and I do not see anything yet.
I was only able to add Mastercards.