American Airlines has a feature called AAdvantage Events which lets you earn miles and Loyalty Points on event tickets. Through the end of February they’ve doubled the earning rate, plus they’re giving the opportunity to earn 500 Loyalty Points when buying tickets by redeeming your AAdvantage miles. This could prove particularly useful for someone trying to hit the next elite status level seeing as you only have a few more days to do that for the 2024/25 earning year.
The Deal
- AAdvantage Events is offering the following promotion:
- Earn 2x miles + 2x Loyalty Points on purchased event tickets
- Earn 500 Loyalty Points when redeeming American Airlines AAdvantage miles for event tickets.
- Direct link to offer.
Key Terms
- Expires February 28, 2025 at 11:59pm CT.
Quick Thoughts
If your plan is to buy your tickets with cash, earning 2x miles plus 2x Loyalty Points is a nicely rewarding deal because the pricing seems to match Ticketmaster’s pricing.
For example, if you’d like to see Billy Joel and Sting in Milwaukee on April 26, through AAdvantage Events you’d be charged $92.25 for the cheapest tickets.
That’s the same price that Ticketmaster is charging for tickets in the same section at the concert:
When booking through AAdvantage Events, the 2x miles and Loyalty Points are earned on the standard ticket price (i.e. before the taxes and fees). In this scenario, that means you’d earn 129 miles and 129 Loyalty Points as the base ticket price is $64.50.
AAdvantage Events also allows you to redeem miles for tickets. Those with AAdvantage status and/or an American Airlines credit card can redeem miles at a preferential rate which appears to be on a 1cpp (cent per point) basis. My wife and I both have an AA credit card and you have to log in to see pricing, so I’m not sure what the redemption rate is for those without status or an eligible credit card.
With the Billy Joel/Sting tickets costing $92.25 including fees, that means it would require 9,225 miles to pay for those. Redeeming miles in this way would earn you 500 Loyalty Points through this promotion provided you book by February 28. (n.b. you have to click through to the final payment screen to see the ‘Redeem Miles’ option.)
We just recalculated our Reasonable Redemption Value for American Airlines and pegged their miles as being reasonably worth 1.4cpp when redeeming them. That means that getting only 1cpp of value for your American Airlines miles via AAdvantage Events is a poor redemption rate, especially considering you can get well in excess of 1.4cpp of value from them for premium cabin redemptions.
That said, there is a case that could be made for taking advantage of this redemption option nonetheless. Unlike most other airline and hotel loyalty programs, earning status in the AAdvantage program doesn’t run on a calendar year basis. Instead, the qualification year runs from March 1 through February 28 each year. That means that AAdvantage members only have a few more days to qualify in the 2024/25 status year for status that will last through February 28, 2026. If you’re only 500 or 1,000 Loyalty Points short of earning the next level of status, it could be worth redeeming miles for one or two tickets at subpar value in order to lock in status. If you can find a cheap enough event through AAdvantage Events, it could be worth a mileage run mattress run concert run even if you have zero interest in attending the event itself. You could always then list the tickets somewhere like StubHub and hope that you can recoup some of the costs.
Something worth being aware of is that the description of the offer says that you’ll earn 500 Loyalty Points ‘per redemption transaction’. That makes it sound like you’ll only earn 500 Loyalty Points per transaction rather than per ticket. If you want to book two tickets to an event, it could therefore be worth redeeming miles for them in separate transactions in order to definitely earn 1,000 Loyalty Points, rather than risking only earning 500 of them when redeeming for them in a single transaction.
If you’re wanting to boost your Loyalty Points and/or AAdvantage mileage balance when buying tickets, AAdvantage Events isn’t the only game in town though. The American Airlines shopping portal has several ticketing sites available through it. For example, at the time of publishing this post the rates include:
- StubHub – 2.5x miles + 2.5x Loyalty Points
- Event Tickets Center – 5x miles + 5x Loyalty Points
- TicketSmarter – 3.5x miles + 3.5x Loyalty Points
Pricing might not be as good through those sites though. The cheapest resale tickets for the Billy Joel/Sting concert were at least 50% more expensive than first-hand tickets through AAdvantage Events when checking last night, so although you’d earn Loyalty Points and miles at a higher rate through those other sites, you might be worse off cash-wise.
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