(EXPIRED) Magazines.com Citi Offer Giving $15 On $20 Spend, Stack With AA Portal & SimplyMiles Or 40x Rakuten

There’s a new opportunity available to earn some easy Loyalty Points towards elite status with American Airlines. There’s a small outlay cash-wise with this Magazines.com stackery, but the redeemable AAdvantage miles you earn more than make up for that even before taking into account the value you’ll get from the Loyalty Points.

The Deals

There are several stackable offers for Magazines.com:

• Spend $20+ at Magazines.com & get $15 back with a targeted Citi Merchant Offer.
  • Direct link to offer.
• Spend $20+ at Magazines.com & earn 695 bonus miles from SimplyMiles.
  • Direct link to offer.
• Earn 15x on Magazines.com purchases through the American Airlines shopping portal.
  • Direct link to offer.
• Earn 1,000 bonus AAdvantage miles when installing the American Airlines shopping portal browser button & using it to spend $25.
  • Direct link to offer.

Key Terms

• Citi Merchant Offer & SimplyMiles offer expire July 31, 2022.
• American Airlines shopping portal browser button promotion expires June 12, 2022.

Quick Thoughts

As you can see from the list of deals above, there are several elements of stackery here. The one that makes it most worthwhile is the Magazines.com Citi Merchant Offer giving $15 back when spending $20 or more. That means that your net cost will be at least $5, but as you’ll see in a moment it could make sense to spend $10 out of pocket in return for the additional rewards on offer.

The next offer is the one from SimplyMiles giving 695 bonus miles when spending $20+ with Magazines.com. This will be doable with most Citi cards because SimplyMiles requires that the card you link for payment is a Mastercard and most Citi cards are Mastercards.

Something important to note with the SimplyMiles offer is that if you use the site’s search bar to search for Magazines.com, it won’t show up. However, scroll through all your offers because this deal will hopefully appear in the list even though it doesn’t appear when using that search bar. Alternatively, use the search bar to search for ‘695’ and the offer should show up if you’re targeted for it. Not only will you earn 695 AAdvantage miles, but you’ll also earn 695 Loyalty Points.

Next up is the American Airlines shopping portal and there are a couple of parts to that. The first is that the portal offers 15x AAdvantage miles (and thereby 15x Loyalty Points too) on purchases from Magazines.com.

The other part is that the portal is currently offering 1,000 bonus miles when installing their browser button and using it to spend $25+. Note that you only earn bonus miles from promotions like that – Loyalty Points aren’t awarded from bonus promotions like this. Also note that the browser button deal requires that you spend $25+ whereas the Citi Merchant Offer and SimplyMiles offer only require $20 of spend.

There are therefore a couple of ways to calculate the worthwhileness of these deals, one based on spending at least $5 out of pocket and one based on spending at least $10 out of pocket.

Spend $20

Cost

• $20 for magazine subscription
• $15 back from Citi Merchant Offer
• Net cost = $5

Earnings

• 695 AAdvantage miles – SimplyMiles
• 695 Loyalty Points – SimplyMiles
• 300 AAdvantage miles – shopping portal
• 300 Loyalty Points – shopping portal
• Total Earnings = 995 AAdvantage miles + 995 Loyalty Points

Spend $25

Cost

• $25 for magazine subscription
• $15 back from Citi Merchant Offer
• Net cost = $10

Earnings

• 695 AAdvantage miles – SimplyMiles
• 695 Loyalty Points – SimplyMiles
• 375 AAdvantage miles – shopping portal
• 375 Loyalty Points – shopping portal
• 1,000 AAdvantage miles – shopping portal (browser button)
• Total Earnings = 2,070 AAdvantage miles + 1,070 Loyalty Points

With the second option where you spend $25, you’re effectively spending an extra $5 to earn an extra 1,075 miles and extra 75 Loyalty Points.

Whichever option you choose, the value of the AAdvantage miles you earn should outweigh the $5 or $10 net cost of the deal with the Loyalty Points being the cherry on top.

Other Tips & Things To Consider

There are a few other things to consider with this stackery. First, there’s a Magazines.com Amex Offer which is also giving $15 back when spending $20. The downside with the Amex Offer is that it won’t stack with the SimplyMiles element because you need to link that SimplyMiles offer to a Mastercard.

It might also be worth holding off on doing this deal in case the American Airlines shopping portal increases the rate it offers for Magazines.com. On five occasions in the last few months they’ve boosted the rate to 25x, so that increased rate will hopefully return in the near future.

Even if they do boost the rate to 25x, that might not end up being your best option. Every few weeks over the past 15 months Rakuten has boosted their usual 20x rate to 40x and at the time of publishing this post the rate is indeed 40x. Earning 40% cashback or 40x Membership Rewards is far more valuable than 15x or even 25x AAdvantage miles, although if you’re seeking American Airlines status then the 15x or 25x corresponding Loyalty Points you’ll also earn could change that equation.

One downside to Magazines.com subscriptions is that you could end up being a penny short as a lot of subscriptions are priced at $19.99 or $24.99. That’s just short of triggering some or all of these offers which is a pain, but there is a solution – or more than one. Once you’ve clicked through to Magazines.com from the shopping portal, manually change the URL after magazines.com to add /special-offers/penny-sale. That’ll give you a selection of magazines that have a cost ending in .01, including at least one costing $20.01, thereby triggering all the offers with the exception of the browser button offer.

Another possible solution – but which isn’t guaranteed – is to hope that the penny offer shows up on a magazine. This sometimes appears for a couple of reasons. One is exit-intent – move your cursor to the top of the browser window and make it look like you’re going to close the browser tab and sometimes you’ll get a popup on-screen offering an additional three months for a penny. Other times that offer appears simply when you linger on a page for a while, but neither of these techniques are guaranteed to make it show up, but it’s worth a try.

Obviously these offers work even better if you’d get some value from the magazine subscription yourself. If you have zero interest in any of the titles but plan to take AAdvantage of the offers in order to earn the miles and Loyalty Points, consider having the subscription sent somewhere that would appreciate it. There are seemingly hundreds of magazine subscriptions available, so sending a women’s interest magazine to a domestic violence shelter or a kids magazine subscription to a children’s hospital would mean someone gets to benefit from these Loyalty Points games.

Finally, don’t forget to set up a reminder to cancel the subscription whenever it’s due to renew. Magazines.com state that they send an email reminder before each auto-renewal, but it’d be best to set up your own reminder in case that email from them goes to your spam folder and subsequently gets missed.

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