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American Airlines has a cool promotion running to earn miles with partner activity. They’re calling it a Holiday To-do List, and they are offering bonus miles in addition to the miles you normally earn for completing activity with multiple partners between now and December 31st. If you have activity with all 10 partners, you could earn 50,000 bonus miles on top of those you naturally earn for partner activity.
The Deal
- Earn bonus miles with every partner activity you complete, up to 50,000 miles if you complete activity with all 10 partners
- See the promotion page here
- Must register here before your qualifying activity (use promo code AAHOL after the login page)
Key Terms
- Must register before your qualifying partner activity
- After registration, earn with partners through 11:59pm CT on December 31, 2017
- Qualifying activity can be completed through multiple transactions
- Bonus miles will be posted within 14 days of the initial miles (i.e. within 14 days after the partner activity posts to your account as I read the terms)
- Base miles and bonus miles count towards qualifying activity with each partner (i.e. If one qualifying activity is to earn 3K miles through the shopping portal and the shopping portal is running a holiday bonus (it is right now), those holiday bonus miles count towards the 3K you need to earn for that activity)
- See the promotion page for full terms
More details
This promotion actually looks pretty good to me. I know I won’t use all of the partners, but I would likely use several of them anyway — and based on additional bonus miles, I may even try out a couple I wouldn’t have otherwise. Here is the chart for how much you’ll earn based on how many partners you interact with during the promotional period:
As you can see, if you complete “qualifying activity” with one partner between registration for the promo and December 31st, you’ll earn 500 total bonus miles (on top of what you earn with that partner). If you complete qualifying activity with 4 partners, you’ll earn a total of 5,000 bonus miles, and so on.
Qualifying activity includes bonus miles being awarded by a partner. For example, one of the qualifying activities is to earn 3,000 miles through the AAdvantage shopping portal. The shopping portal currently has a tiered bonus. One of the tiers is “Spend $600, get 2,000 bonus miles”. Those bonus miles count towards the 3,000 total miles you need to earn. Many of the partners have similar bonus offers (especially at this time of year), making it pretty easy to complete partner activity with a number of them.
For reference, here are the definitions of “qualifying activity” with each of the 10 partners:
- Miles for Opinions: Earn at least 300 miles with Miles for Opinions
- Sprint: Earn at least 417 miles with Sprint
- Rocketmiles: Earn at least 5,000 miles with Rocketmiles
- AAdvantage eShopping: Earn at least 3,000 miles with AAdvantage eShopping
- 1-800 Flowers: Earn at least 2,000 AAdvantage miles with 1-800-FLOWERS (Earn 30 miles per dollar with promo code A56)
- The AAdvantage Dining Program: Earn at least 500 miles with AAdvantage Dining
- Avis Budget Group: Earn at least 1,500 miles with Avis Budget Group
- LifeLock: Earn at least 7,000 miles with Lifelock
- Vinesse: Earn at least 500 miles with Vinesse
- Hilton: Earn at least 1,000 miles with Hilton
Those activities aren’t too tough to achieve. Some of them are downright easy. I see myself almost definitely completing the following four offers:
- I definitely would have earned miles through the shopping portal with or without this promotion.
- I’m going to be away this Saturday night and didn’t have plans for dinner. First AAdvantage Dine will complete this one
- Miles for Opinions. You get 250 miles for the first survey. I’ll hang in there to pick up the other 50 miles to complete this
- At 30 miles per dollar, it takes less than $67 in spending to reach the qualifying activity — I’ll look to combo with an Amex Offer and send someone a holiday gift from 1800Flowers.
If I get that far, I’ll complete the Hilton offer next. Normally, 10,000 Hilton points earn 1,500 American Airlines miles. But if I get at least 4 partner activities done, converting 10K Hilton points to 1,500 American Airlines miles will qualify me for the next bonus tier — the fifth activity earns 4,000 bonus AA miles (and it goes up from there). I wouldn’t normally convert 10K Hilton points for 1500 AA miles — but I might do it if the pot gets sweetened by 4K miles. It’s certainly possible that I could end up completing a couple more — the Avis offer could come in handy, Vinesse offers 5K bonus miles for singing up, etc. I doubt I’ll complete all of them, but I wouldn’t be surprised if I end up completing quite a few.
Bottom line
This is a pretty interesting promotion, especially considering that the qualifying activity isn’t unreasonable even if you’re not new to each of the activities — if you are new to some of them, it’s even easier to stack bonus miles to complete qualifying activity. American Airlines availability hasn’t been outstanding, but they claim it is improving. Anecdotally, I’ve found that to be true on some recent award searches (though most of my award searches are either close-in domestically or pretty far out internationally, so my sample set may not match yours). I’m always happy to pick up some extra miles when it’s easy — and this promotion mostly fits the bill. Don’t forget to register before completing partner activity — any partner activity before registration will not count per the terms.
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[…] don’t forget about American’s Holiday Checklist promo — if you’re earning some miles through the shopping portal, you might want to consider […]
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I wish it was as good as the Us airways grand slam back in the day.
Same here. Miss it.
Can I do the 1800flowers promo THROUGH the shopping portal to complete both offers?
That’s a good question. My answer is that I don’t *think* so. I *think* you need to use the 30x promo code and earn the 2K miles from 1800Flowers. If you go through the portal, I think the promo code will cancel out the portal miles. If you don’t use the promo code, you’ll be earning miles from the shopping portal, not from 1800Flowers (hope that makes sense).
Based on past experience with United shopping portal, the answer is no. 1800Flowers (and FTD and probably most/all of the other flower delivery sites) aren’t actually part of the shopping portal, they are rather direct and separate partners of the airline. The shopping portal adds the sites to their page anyway at the request of the airline for additional visibility, but the shopping portal actually isn’t involved at all (no shopping-portal-cookie set when you go to 1800Flowers’ page from the shopping portal) — this is also why you have to manually enter your airline # into the flower’s order page yourself.
FYI, I know this b/c I had tried to use 1800Flowers order to meet a United shopping portal bonus from last year, and when I emailed them about it, they explained why it didn’t count.
If you use 1800 Flowers via the shopping portal the points will post as AA Shopping and NOT as 1800 Flowers. I had this happen for previous promotion from AA
What’s the AmEx Offer for 1800Flowers? was it posted here?
P.S. also, if anyone already tried with 1800Flowers – miles are given for the amount excluding tax and shipping?
I can’t think of a situation where tax and shipping are ever included in portal rewards (unless shipping is “free” — the word free in quotes because “free” shipping is obviously built into the purchase price). When tax and shipping are charged separately, I don’t think you’ll ever earn portal rewards on those fees (though maybe there is an exception that’s not coming to mind…)
Thank you Nick, I thought as much. Their shipping is quite high ($15 – and this promo can’t be used with free ShopRunner), not worth it without some kind of stacking offer.
The most recent one expired 10/31:
https://frequentmiler.com/2017/08/16/1800flowers-amex-offer-back-care/
But I’d be pretty surprised if we don’t see another one before Christmas, and I’ll be looking to stack when that happens.
I use AT&T, and I’m happy with them. Any suggestions on how to get the Sprint goal?
I’m sure this specific deal is long gone, but it might give you some things to look for / think about:
https://frequentmiler.com/2017/10/11/potential-stack-can-find-w-sprint-s7-edge-25k-aa/
[…] Earn Up to 50K AA Miles: With the holidays coming up, you may easily be able to earn 50,000 bonus American Airline miles with their latest promotion. If you complete the required criteria with 10 partners, you could earn those bonus miles. Depending on your shopping list, this may be an easy bonus for your to earn. […]
I’m not sure how this work. I’m new to everything!
What do I need to do step by step?
And how much would this cost me?
“Miles for Opinions is not currently accepting new members at this time.” :-/
What? I got in with no problem today. 30 minutes ago. That’s weird.
The AA-Hole promo. Super.
I need just over 1,200 miles to get to 50,000 in my AA account so I can book a couple of tickets for next summer. What is the easiest possible way to do this? Would just dining out once (500 miles) and signing up for Miles for Opinions (earn 300 miles) and then that would be 2 activities which would earn me 1,500 miles. Am I interpreting this correctly? Thanks for all the advice!
Actually to be exact I need 1,156 miles to reach the 50,000.
Do spend on an AA Card like buying gift of college or visa gift cards or buy those few miles.
That seems cheaper and easier.
I do not have a AA credit card.
Another option: Transfer 10K Hilton points to 1,500 miles. Remember that you can pool Hilton points with up to 10 people, so you if you’re short, you could get those points from a friend. That’s probably your fastest route. You’d end up with 2K total miles since you’d get the 500 mile bonus from completing activity with one partner.
That would earn you 1500 miles plus the 800 miles from those activities. I believe there’s a promo for 3K miles if it’s your first time dining with AAdvantage dining and you complete a dine within 30 days and review the restaurant. If you qualify for that, you’ll have even more miles.
Note that I have no idea how long it takes miles to post from the surveys and dining (and the bonus miles won’t post until 14 days after those things post).
I am not sure I will earn the 500 miles from the dining for one dinner unless I spend $167, as I do not qualify for any of those bonuses in my account that I see. I think the easiest and quickest thing for me to do is to do the 30 miles for every $1 and get flowers delivered and it would cost me around $50-$55. Not ideal, but they would post quick, as I am scared to lose availability for this FLL-SEA I am doing on Alaska Air next May or so.
What’s being suggested is the “new member bonus” for the dining. Have you participated in this program (AA Dining) before? If not, sign up, dine, get 3m/$ + 1500 to 3000m newbie bonus. Doesn’t matter if it’s a cheap dinner. You’re done. (Actually, first dine must be $25+)
https://aa.rewardsnetwork.com/bonus.htm
I’d earn the shopping portal bonus for UA, AS and Southwest before I’d bother with this.