GiftCards.com has been removed from some shopping portals. Doctor of Credit reports that this happens from time to time and isn’t cause for concern, but for those of us who left it to the end of the month to place an order, there goes one avenue for some easy American Airlines AAdvantage Loyalty Points.
This appears to affect multiple portals run by Cartera (which means most of the airline miles-earning portals and some of the hotel portals). That’s a bummer particularly because AAdvantage eShopping has been offering 3 miles per dollar spent almost all year long at GiftCards.com (on up to $2,000 in orders per month). That’s been an easy 6,000 miles / Loyalty Points for many people.
Fortunately, this doesn’t (yet) appear to affect other portals. Truthfully, American Airlines hasn’t had the best payout for GiftCards.com: I’ve regularly been seeing 6-8% cash back through Capital One Shopping targeted offers, which means that I’d effectively be buying American Airlines miles at a cost of around 2.7 cents per mile if I chose miles over cash back (Greg can argue that I’d lose the opportunity for 2.7c for each mile — any way you slice it, the choice is $160 versus 6,000 miles).
Hopefully this is just a temporary change and it will get added back to the portal soon because I’m sure that many people are counting on getting easy Loyalty Points in January and February.
H/T: Doctor of Credit
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@Nick Reyes said: “That’s been an easy 6,000 miles / Loyalty Points for many people.”
Really, it was 8,000 easy LP per month. the extra 2,000 LP came from charging it to your AA affiliated Credit Card.
That was an 96K loyalty points a year.
I keep looking to giftcards.com to see if it’s back like a junkie looking for a fix.
Anyone experienced the same from Citi’s merchant offer ? Once your card has redeemed an offer from giftcards.com, you are not able to enroll any next offer from giftcards.com anymore…
Waiting for giftcards.com to return to Aadvantage portal.
GiftCards purchases renewed my status with AA next year. I’m encouraged to hear this type of outage has happened before. I sure hope they come back with better tracking – I’ve spent hours reconciling and chasing points for un-credited purchases.
For what it’s worth made a gift cards.com purchase through the AA portal five days ago that hasn’t tracked yet. Normally I use Rakuten for giftcards.com without issue so not sure if AA normally has issues with cartera but now you’ve got me intrigued.
As a followup, emailed them 14 days after the purchase with screenshot of my receipt. Two days later I saw an email confirming I was correct and points transferred immediately. Have had mixed experience requesting credit for these kind of issues in the past but this was quick and painless, thanks Cartera.
Somewhat related, also unable to find Xbox gift cards at Dell.com for utilizing the Amex Business Platinum credits. Looking for ideas on what to buy for digital delivery so the purchase date is before end of year 2022.