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I’ve always wanted to be a procrastinator, I’ve just never gotten around to it :-D. Despite having written several times about the many ways I intended to meet my American Airlines / Hyatt fast track challenge (from this old expired promotion), I left it until the eleventh hour to complete. Here’s how I attempted to make a mad dash for the finish line to complete my status challenge, why I did it, and how it turned out.
Hyatt / AA Status Pass (long expired)
As a reminder, I signed up for an American Airlines instant status pass that was briefly offered to some Hyatt Globalists last fall. The gist of it is that I was granted temporary American Airlines Platinum Pro status for four months. In order to extend that status for another four months, I would have to earn 42,000 American Airlines miles between my registration on October 1, 2023 and February 1, 2024.
Read more about that expired offer in this post: American Airlines back with instant status pass for Hyatt Elite Members (targeted)
A rush for Star Alliance Gold
I rarely fly American Airlines, so the pursuit of American Airlines elite status is admittedly fairly ridiculous. I played the game a couple of years ago mostly because it was fun to see if I could get meaningful elite status without flying. I made it to American Airlines Platinum status and mostly lost interest in the chase. I took up the instant status pass last fall in large part because I thought it would be easy to meet (and I wrote about that when Delta said they would make elite status so hard to obtain, which they later walked back).
But despite enjoying the game a bit, I didn’t dive in the way I expected to requalify for four more months of Platinum Pro status. And frankly, I didn’t really care much….until…..
A few weeks ago, I wrote about a Turkish Miles & Smiles status match. Those with high-level oneworld elite status have been getting Turkish Elite status, which is good for Star Alliance Gold status. Furthermore, it is relatively easy to extend that Star Alliance Gold status for two years. I want that.
The reason I want that is mostly near-term: I have a trip to Hawaii coming up soon where we booked our tickets in economy class on United using Turkish Miles & Smiles miles. While we were happy to get nonstop flights from Newark to Honolulu and back for just 7,500 miles per passenger each way, there is no denying that Newark to Honolulu is a loooong way to go in economy class (with two kids!).
Making matters worse is the fact that there were not many seats available for free seat selection on our flights. Furthermore, we always check a bag or two. That’s going to cost us at least $70 round trip (and it isn’t uncommon that we check two bags). It also means we may be in for a long check-in line at Newark — and since the flight to Honolulu is a morning flight, that means planning to wake up really early in order to be sure we have enough time to wait in what could be a long check-in line (and then have no lounge access afterwards!).
However, if we could get Star Alliance Gold status, we would get a free checked bag and access to the business class check-in line, which should mean very little waiting in line to drop that bag off.
And if I can keep Star Alliance Gold for two years, that would certainly come in handy for similar bookings.
I tried matching to Turkish Elite status with my Platinum Pro / oneworld Emerald temporary status, but the expiration date showed 2/1/24 and Turkish told me that I had to be able to show a card with at least 4 months of validity. Some others matched the temporary status without a problem, so I took a second shot at it but got the same response, so I shifted my focus to re-qualifying for Platinum Pro by earning the 42K Loyalty Points by 2/1/24. If I could hit that threshold by 2/1, American Airlines would extend my Platinum Pro status by 4 months to 6/1/24. Once that happened, I figured I could re-submit a match request with Turkish since I would be able to show a oneworld Emerald card with 4 months of validity.
Starting point: 14K Loyalty Points
From the time I matched in October until the time the Turkish status match lit a fire under me, I had earned about 14,000 Loyalty Points fairly organically. A small number of those points were earned through ordinary shopping portal activity, but most of them were from credit card purchases. I opened the Barclays Aviator Red card in October and I had quite a bit of spend around the holidays, including some buying group activity.
While I don’t generally prefer to earn just 1 mile per dollar spent on purchases, I had enough spend late in the year to want to spread it across multiple issuers. I value American Airlines miles and knew that the Loyalty Points would help in this pursuit, so I had put north of $10K in purchases on my Aviator Red card. It’s worth noting that this played into my decision to later accept an upgrade offer to the Aviator Silver as I’m going to complete spending my way to a 5K Loyalty Point bonus and two Companion Certificates (see more about that in this post).
However, as February 1st neared, I was only up to 14K Loyalty Points, which left me scrambling to earn 28K more to keep my Platinum Pro status.
A mad dash to try to earn 28K Loyalty Points in a few days
By the time I got serious about this and had some time to dedicate to it, I had only a few days left in January to try to earn 28,000 Loyalty Points. Truth be told, I hadn’t been overly concerned because I thought this would be relatively easy to do. Here’s how I intended to do it and how each item worked out.
Motley Fool: Easy 6700 miles / Loyalty Points
This one was simple: The Motley Fool was offering 6,700 American Airlines AAdvantage miles and Loyalty Points through AAdvantage eShopping. They’ve offered similar returns several times. For those unfamiliar, The Motley Fool is a stock-picking email newsletter. I am not a fan of their newsletter or the funnel they have set up during the sign-up process to try to funnel more money out of your wallet (an odd strategy for a company supposedly focused on helping you grow your wealth). However, the offers to sign up and let them flood an email inbox with their frequent “hot tips” were compelling enough for me.
On past deals, The Motley Fool has offered both card-linked savings and shopping portal offerings at the same time despite not wanting to honor both. See that link for more info, but the gist of it is that during past deals, a representative from The Motley Fool has reached out to us to tell us that the shopping portal and card-linked offers are independent and each exclude “any other offers” — they have specifically called out the fact that they will not allow for stacking the two.
I was therefore hesitant to try to stack the portal payout with the Amex Offer for $50 back on $99. However, we had several reader reports of success in stacking the two concurrent offers and I figured that if The Motley Fool didn’t want to pay out both offers, then their marketing team knows better at this point and ought to only offer one type of deal at a time. If they want the added exposure of marketing to multiple channels at once (i.e. both shopping portal customers and Amex customers), they have to accept that some people are going to take advantage of where the Venn Diagram overlaps. So I signed up.
Shortly after signing up, I got the email confirming that I’d used an Amex Offer, which means that I should pay a net cost of $56 (after tax on the subscription) for 6,700 miles and Loyalty Points. I also almost immediately got an email from the AAdvantage eShopping portal confirming that my order had tracked. Within a couple of days, the miles and Loyalty Points posted to my American Airlines account successfully. That dropped me to 21,300 Loyalty Points left to go (and I don’t feel bad about having spent $49 for 6,700 miles for a cost of 0.8c per mile since I know I’ll use the miles at significantly more value).
Millionacres: Easy 6700 miles / Loyalty Points
Millionacres is essentially The Motley Fool for real estate investing. In fact, The Motley Fool owns Millionacres. Everything about this deal is the same as above except for the Amex Offer as I didn’t have another Motley Fool Amex Offer.
Therefore, I ended up paying about $106 with tax and I earned 6,700 miles and Loyalty Points a few days later. I was far less enthused about paying 1.6c per mile for these miles, but they shortened the distance to the goal post: I only needed another 14,600 Loyalty Points to keep my Platinum Pro status. And I was pretty confident that I wouldn’t use the miles to worse value than 1.6c per mile.
T-Mobile Home Internet: Low-cost 7400 miles / Loyalty Points
Stephen recently wrote about the great deal that T-Mobile Home Internet is currently offering: you can get a $150 virtual Mastercard gift card and 7,400 American Airlines miles and Loyalty Points when you sign up for T-Mobile Home Internet and maintain service for at least 60 days. In reality, Stephen suggested that one would probably need to maintain service for 3 months and I concur, so the expected cost here is really $180 – $150 virtual Mastercard + 7400 miles / Loyalty Points. If we consider the Mastercard at face value to keep the math simple, this deal is a net cost of $30 for 7,400 miles / Loyalty points. I would gladly pay 0.4c per mile for American Airlines miles all day long (I wish I had done a lot more of that when it was possible).
One wrinkle in this deal is that I already have T-Mobile Home Internet (the deal was for new Home Internet customers). A second wrinkle is that you need a qualifying home address for service (in a bizarre twist, the T-Mobile Home Internet website says that my home address is not eligible to get T-Mobile Home Internet….despite the fact that I have T-Mobile Home Internet. I tried several addresses in my town and got the same for each that I tried). A third wrinkle is that the terms on the AAdvantage portal and for the $150 offer say that you can not currently have T-Mobile phone service to get the deal (and I do have T-Mobile cell service).
The first wrinkle was easy enough to fix: Since our T-Mobile Home Internet is in my name, my wife could click through from my AAdvantage account and sign up for T-Mobile Home Internet in her name since she doesn’t currently have T-Mobile Home Internet in her name. I had originally hoped to do this with our regular home address and “Apartment 2” or something like that, but that plan got shot down when the T-Mobile site said that T-Mobile Home Internet is not available at our home address. However, we have a family member in a different nearby town whose address was eligible. Thankfully, the service address and the billing address do not need to match — so it would be easy enough for my wife to order the service and have it billed to her but sent to the family member’s address.
But then there was that third wrinkle: if you currently have T-Mobile cell phone service, you aren’t eligible. Unfortunately, both my wife and the family member in question are on my T-Mobile phone service account. However, since the T-Mobile account is billed to me, the family member’s home address (the service address we’re using for T-Mobile Home Internet on my wife’s new account) is not in T-Mobile’s system. However, I thought that T-Mobile might disqualify the order from earning the $150 gift card and the portal payout if the phone number associated with the new account was a T-Mobile phone number.
But then I realized that I opened a Consumer Cellular line in December to take advantage of an easy Capital One Shopping deal for $250 back. That means that we have a spare phone line that is not on T-Mobile. I do have that Consumer Cellular SIM card in an old Pixel 3 that we had lying around, so it is an operational line and she could confirm the number if necessary.
Singing up was easy. As is the case with any postpaid cell phone service, T-Mobile does do a credit check. If you’re uber-concerned about hard pulls, I guess that deal may not be for you. That said, I’m not at all concerned about hard pulls because I understand that they don’t really matter (despite what a rejection letter says now and then, “too many inquiries” isn’t really the reason someone gets denied for a new card).
Overall, it was very easy to sign up for this. Unfortunately, the service now costs $60 per month with autopay (which requires putting a debit card on file as the autopayment method, though you can pay with a credit card before it charges the autopay payment method). That means I’ll be on the hook for $180 since I’ll pay for 3 months to make sure nothing gets clawed back. However, I’ll end up with a $150 virtual gift card and 7,400 Loyalty Points. At least, I hoped that would happen (more on that in a minute). Assuming this order posted, I’d be down to needing 7,200 more Loyalty Points to requalify for Platinum Pro.
Blue Apron: 5500 miles / Loyalty Points
Blue Apron is a prepared meal delivery service. We’ve had Blue Apron before and liked it well enough, but the cost of these meal delivery kits just never makes sense for us long-term. Still, the American Airlines portal was offering 5,500 miles and Loyalty Points for signing up for Blue Apron service.
The shopping portal terms indicate that this deal is only for new subscribers. Since we’ve had this before, we signed up for a family member who is an authorized user on one of our credit cards. However, terms also indicate that the payout is only valid for one subscription per loyalty account number. We did sign up for Blue Apron through AAdvantage eShopping in the past. Would they really only pay out on this once per lifetime per AAdvantage account? I took a gamble and figured that they probably aren’t really excluding you from ever getting a portal reward again for ordering the service for yourself or as a gift for someone else.
An unexpected annoyance here is that I set up the delivery address as the recipient’s business address. It turned out that was a bad idea because Blue Apron only offered Saturday delivery dates (maybe this differs regionally?)….and that person’s business is not open on Saturdays. As it turned out, the first delivery came on a Monday — I don’t know whether that’s because FedEx knows that the business isn’t open on Saturdays or that’s just the timing on how the package moved through the system.
Assuming this posted, I’d only be 1,700 Loyalty Points short of requalifying for Platinum Pro status.
GiftCards.com: 1,750 Loyalty Points
I initially figured that I would finish up this challenge with an easy order from GiftCards.com. American Airlines eShopping offers 1 mile and Loyalty Point per dollar spent through GiftCards.com. That’s not nearly as good as some of the targeted Capital One Shopping offers I’ve gotten before (which have gone as high as 18% back!), but I placed an order looking to earn the rest of the required Loyalty Points and expected to earn 1,750 Loyalty Points, which would put me across the finish line.
A Dell order I’d forgotten: 3,600 Loyalty Points
A couple of days after February 1st, I got an email from American Airlines eShopping confirming that I’d earned 3,600 miles from a Dell purchase in mid-January that I’d forgotten about entirely. Sure enough, that 3,600 points posted retroactively with the January 17th transaction date despite the fact that they didn’t become available in my American Airlines account until a couple of days into February.
Did I make it?
Much to my surprise, this didn’t work out for several reasons:
- Loyalty Points haven’t posted quickly enough. I was afraid that this might happen: although my order for T-Mobile Home Internet shows up under my shopping trips, it tracked as $0 spent. I’m guessing that it doesn’t actually trigger the miles until you’ve had service for the required 2 months — which means that these miles might not post to my account until March. That was a big burn.
- Blue Apron hasn’t paid out. This might be the same as with T-Mobile Home Internet in that it may just not pay out until your account has been active for the required 45 days. However, unlike T-Mobile, this order did track at the ~$80 I spent on the first delivery. It shows up in my store visit history, but there are no miles in my account and I didn’t receive any confirmation from AAdvantage eShopping that the order tracked, so at this point I think maybe I’m just not going to get these miles because I’ve earned miles from Blue Apron through my AAdvantage account before.
- GiftCards.com didn’t track. I’ve never had a problem with this before, but this time around my GiftCards dot com order seems to have failed to track entirely. It shows up in my store visit history, but there is no order associated with the click. I’m going to have to follow up with AAdvantage eShopping on this.
I earned 13,400 Loyalty Points from The Motley Fool and Millionacres and I actually completed a couple of $1 trial membership deals for another 850 Loyalty Points before I realized that I had the 3,600 additional Loyalty Points coming from the Dell deal. I also lost a few points from a return that I’d forgotten I’d ordered through AAdvantage shopping, so I think I ended up about 11,800 Loyalty Points short of the 42K Loyalty Points goal.
I expect that I’ll probably eventually get the 7,400 miles from T-Mobile Home Internet. And when they post, I expect that they will likely be back-dated to the date in January when I initially signed up. Not getting Blue Apron would still appear to leave me short, but I actually ended up placing a second GiftCards.com order on the final day of the month for the same amount, so theoretically it isn’t impossible that I could earn the Loyalty Points from both T-Mobile Home Internet and those GiftCards.com orders and they would all retroactively post with January dates and put me just over the hump to 42,000 Loyalty Points.
However, at this point, American already notified me that I only met the requirements for Platinum status during the challenge and my Instant Status Pass tracker has moved on to tracking my Phase 2 qualification period in terms of the number of miles I’d need to earn to keep Platinum status beyond June 1, 2024
Even if my late January orders eventually track and are back-dated to January, it doesn’t look like American Airlines is going to automatically “fix” my status and bump me up to Platinum Pro. I expect that maybe I could get that resolved by reaching out to customer service after the Loyalty Points actually post to my account and maybe they would manually bump me up to Platinum Pro. I think it’s a long-shot in explaining that to anyone at customer service and actually getting it to happen, but regardless of that part of the challenge, the major problem is that I now don’t expect the T-Mobile Home Internet miles to show up until probably sometime after my initial 60 days of service, which won’t be until at least late March. The best-case scenario is that I’ll end up with about 2 months of Platinum Pro status, which probably wouldn’t work for matching to Turkish (and definitely won’t help me for my near-term trip where I very much wanted Star Alliance Gold status).
Taking a swing with Turkish
My American Airlines Platinum status had been due to expire on 3/1/24. Since I earned more than 25,000 Loyalty Points during the Instant Status Pass, American initially gave me Platinum status through 6/1/24. Then, in early February, I was in the American Airlines app and a message popped up saying something about how I’d been given an offer to get Platinum status through March 2025 with a link to “view offer”. Before I could click on that, it disappeared — and I couldn’t find it again (there was nothing in my Promotions tab about it). However, a day or two later, my AAdvantage status updated to Platinum with an expiration date of 3/1/25. I don’t know why this happened.
However, since Platinum status is oneworld Sapphire status, I decided to take a swing with Turkish Airlines. All of the data points I’d seen at StatusMatcher.com had been positive reports of matching Platinum Pro status, which is oneworld Emerald, to Turkish Elite, which is Star Alliance Gold. From the Executive Traveller report about this match, my impression was that Turkish was specifically targeting oneworld Emerald members because of its expansion to Australia (ultimately, their goal is probably to poach some high-level Qantas and British Airways customers).
I didn’t see many reports at StatusMatcher from people who tried with AAdvantage Platinum status only. I asked in our Frequent Miler Insiders group whether any members had tried matching from AAdvantage Platinum, but the only people who replied had matched from Platinum Pro.
I therefore decided to be the data point I wanted to see and I emailed Turkish explaining that I have oneworld Sapphire status and I am interested in seeing if they would match me to Turkish Airlines Elite (Star Alliance Gold) status. Turkish turned me down.
Dear Nicholas REYES,
Thank you for your interest in Miles&Smiles, the frequent flyer program which offers a whole world of benefits.
However, the level of your frequent flyer program membership is not equivalent to Star Alliance Gold. As such, we are unable to fulfill your request to match your membership status to Elite.
Your membership status in another frequent flyer program must be equivalent to at least Miles&Smiles Elite status to be matched.
Thank you for your understanding. We look forward to flying with you soon.
Bummer. Looks like I’ll be paying for bags and getting up early to stand in the regular check-in line for my flight to Hawaii after all.
Bottom line
I made a mad dash for American Airlines Platinum Pro status in the hopes of matching that status to Star Alliance Gold status through Turkish Miles & Smiles. Unfortunately, my own procrastination led me to fall unexpectedly short of qualifying for Platinum Pro thanks to some orders that either didn’t track or didn’t track quickly enough through AAdvantage eShopping. I took a swing at a match to Turkish from American Airlines Platinum status and was denied. Ultimately, you can’t win ’em all. I’m disappointed that I fell short in this quest, but I won’t dwell on it. Maybe I’ll follow up with American Airlines down the road and try another swing at the Star Alliance Gold piñata in a few months, but ultimately I’ll still have fallen short of the goalpost on this one. On to the next one.
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Do you need to activate the home internet to get the miles?
This Instant Status Match challenge has become an interesting diversion for me lately. So far, I have been awarded a couple of upgrades on domestic flights, in addition to the free baggage allowance.
I didn’t do Millionacres because I asked AAdvantage eshopping and was told that the bonus for Motley Fool and Millionacres was basically the same bonus and that you could not earn both. But now I will give Millionacres a try when it’s at a higher payout!
Also, when I completed my first phase of the Instant Status Match challenge, I my status was showing as valid through Feb 28, 2025, which was a surprise to me. But that was corrected the very next day.
I spend my free time the last week of February writing emails to AAdvantage EShopping to chase down points that didn’t post (1000 from Hungryroot backdated to September), or ones that posted incorrectly (for instance, I got Old Navy points 2/$ intead of Athleta points 10/$ and complained about it.) I managed to get a few thousand extra points out of those efforts.
Also, I noticed that a couple of vendors clawed back their awards, but they only took back the award miles, not the Loyalty Points. Anybody else have this happen?
I didn’t think I could reach the 125K to earn Platinum Pro outright for the year, but I did manage to get to 100K Loyalty points before Feb 29 and tried to time that as close to Feb 29 as possible. So I have 6 months in which I am earning with a 30% bonus on Simply Miles, AAdvantage eshopping, dining and hotels.
Nice!
Re: Millionacres: Glad you found it helpful to know that it works. Regarding asking customer service about it…..Your general rule of thumb should be that any sort of complicated, nuanced question like this is not one to ask customer service (or that their answer is for entertainment value only). They are never going to know the answer, they are just going to guess, and they’ll probably guess wrongly more often than not. You want to ask that type of question in our Frequent Miler Insiders Facebook group where you’ll get people with real-world experience who have tried it. Asking a customer service person, who may never have used the shopping portal at all and almost certainly hasn’t tried doing both offers to see if it works, is a waste of energy. That’s true on lots of things. I often advise people that this is just a job for the average customer service person — they are clocking in, reading a script, and trying to get people off the phone to move to the next person. They aren’t experimenting to see what works — they aren’t up at night wondering “Oh, I wonder if you can . . . ” and they most certainly aren’t thinking outside the box about ways to get more value than what they see on the surface — so they are infinitely less likely to know finer details like that. It’s not that customer service wants to mislead you, it’s just that they frequently aren’t attuned to those finer details.
Nice job following up on missing miles. As to your “Anybody else have this happen?” question, the answer is yes. That’s how it generally works in practice. When you notice a happy accident like that, particularly one that repeats, it is probably best to be quietly thankful about it. I wouldn’t recommend shouting it from the rooftops.
Anyway, keep up the good work!
You got lucky with getting the Blue Apron bonus more than once. I tried this year and was rejected based on the once per account terms
DP that may or may not be relevant here… I completed qualifying transactions for EP in this same challenge, but some of them didn’t post until after the initial qualification period. Once they did (backdated to the date of the transactions), I contacted AAdvantage customer service and explained why I should have EP as opposed to PP due to the new backdated transactions. The CSR I spoke with seemed very confused and unfamiliar with the details of this particular status challenge and it took a while to explain it to her, but she took down all of my information and said she would open an escalation. I never heard anything back from AA, but less than 24 hours later my AA status had updated from PP to EP.
I submitted a status match with the copy of screen shot of my AA plat pro with expiration date, last few months of account activity and a copy of my passport. I got a message asking me to submit the front and back of my FF card with one world emerald logo. Where the hell I can find this?
I’ve kinda given up on AA at this point, I rarely fly them. I usually prefer their portal but most things don’t track/never post, I did that motely fool last year but I never got the loyalty points cos of the amex offer. My instant status pass expired unused and I wish I tried that turkish match although it sounds unlikely it would have worked.
Starting March 1st (the AA “new year”) there will be a new 15k threshold where you get group 5 boarding and a choice of priority privileges for 1 flight or 5 select seat coupons. If your loyalty points don’t credit to the prior “year” then at least you are a good chunk of the way there.
I’m on the Instant Status Pass also, but have PPro already (work trip hotels thru Aadvantagehotels is how I’m doing it). Just biding my time to status match as I want to do the 1x Turkish flight in first 4 months to garner the full year and won’t be in Europe until late this year. Hoping the match sticks around that long. Thank you for sharing your experience!
My giftcards.com orders have not been reliably tracking. The good news is that they have been approving my missing mile requests in under 2 hours (need to wait 15 days after the transaction to file the request).
Thanks Oliver, that’s a helpful data point.
Nick, thank you for writing about it. These types of posts are rarity, and I appreciate it very much. I’d appreciate this type of posts just as much if not more than the the posts about success stories. Ultimately we prob will learn more from the failures than successes. Well done Nick.
Can you just buy something from Dell, get the points (says they post in 1-2 days), get the status and return stuff to Dell after 29 days ?
Will the status stay ?
I asked this on Facebook forum for members and I was completely harassed by people telling me I was trying to scam the system. No idea if anyone has an answer to this question or if no one wants to answer.
I don’t know if you mean that you asked in our Facebook group (I don’t recall a question about this and I tried to search and the only question about doing this with Dell was from 2022 and it don’t see any harassing responses to that one), but in general I find the buy-and-return angle over the line for me. I’ve often said that the miles and points game has some grey areas and we all draw the line in different places as to what we think is OK. Personally, I’m not going that route. That said, this is the sort of thing that you’re probably better off trying and seeing what happens than asking about it publicly. It doesn’t cost you anything to try if you’re returning the stuff anyway. If you post that question for public consumption, it isn’t inconceivable that some will offer their public judgment on the morality of it (like I said, I didn’t see this happen in our group, but I simultaneously wouldn’t expect that nobody would question the morality of it) and if it does work I can’t imagine anyone who knows that it does is going to publicly say that much both because they don’t want the pitchforks aimed at them and they probably don’t want it widely known that it works. Like I said, it’s out of my comfort zone to intentionally try to do this, so I’m not testing this with Dell or looking for public data points on it.
Hi Nick, my apologies for not clarifying. It was a different FB group, not related to you. I am not intentionally trying to game the system or get people to do it. I think the best way to phrase it is that a 12,000 miles item posted but I have 60 days to see if it’s a right fit. If that 12,000 miles put me at Plat Pro and then 60 days later, I returned the item and then about 4 weeks later, AA removes the miles then I was wondering if I need to make sure I don’t make “tentative” purchases if they are too close to the status level or make sure I go way over in case I do have some returns. I even tried to ask the AAdvantage desk and they did not know the answer. I think it’s a valid question but alas, not easy to get an answer. I by no means want to game their system and I do not think their software systems are 100% perfect. Many times, I did not have the miles subtracted even if I did return an item. I know some folks that made million miler during Covid and they did not even spend on their credit card so they have no idea how they got MM. I don’t game the system with Blue Apron and then cancel after the 45 day (or whatever it is!). I did read about that one and how people did it all the time. Still gaming the system but not as bad. There is also the one about the hotels. Book one night stay in Thailand and get 15,000 miles for $140. The person never checked it. I can’t believe they would get credit but they said that they did get credit since it is digital check-in. The AAdvantage Hotels are a great deal (you get miles and LP’s) so I like to do that if I am already traveling.
The real cautionary tale for me is…don’t pass up any status that can be reasonably attained. Who could have told me that matching Hilton to Wyndham to Caesars years ago would have led to about $400 in Florida casino money and 5 free cruises?
I do fly American a lot so I jumped on the Instant Status Match and went all out with organic spend, AA portal shopping and MGM and Thailand virtual stays to attain Executive Platinum. Which I matched to Turkish as soon as I realized I was going to Dubai this month. I’m returning Turkish business. That was not enough for the 2 year Star Alliance Gold, so I’m adding a flight on an other trip (free cruise trip to Norway!). With the devaluation the Turkish miles are not as valuable, but the *A Gold is. I have had the United Club card for years. It was good when it gave 1.5X United miles on everything and I didn’t have the Freedom Unlimited. But with 2 years of the *A Gold through Turkish I can downgrade this card and save 2 annual fees. I had United Platinum (And Singapore Gold thanks to an AMEX transfer offer) but lost both this year. Cannot see how I’ll regain United Gold this year or the next with the spend required. Once I got used to the Star Gold benefits I wanted to keep them.
Back to American, I realized last night that I’m 7500 LPs away from 2 systemwide upgrade certs, so I got magazines, 2 dog offers and Consumer Cellular. Then I just need a little cc spend.
Excellent
As a smart person in a fedora once said, “You miss all the balls you do not swing at”. Thanks for sharing your experience Nick and better luck next at bat 🙂
Indy?
I also am making a mad dash on AA status and am actually experiencing the same hiccups you described with the same vendors not tracking or posting in a timely manner.
The American shopping portal is the absolute worst. I’ve had to contact them several times when points didn’t post, and I’ve just given up other times (which is probably what they want). I’ve never had a single thing not track in Rakuten or United’s shopping portal, so I don’t understand why AA’s is so problematic.
FYI, the AA shopping portal is operated by a unit of Rakuten, which makes one wonder if *something * is going on. I’ve experienced the same.
It is frustrating that so many of my orders have failed to track lately. So far I’ve always had success getting the points posted on request after 15 days, but I shouldn’t have to keep asking.
I signed up for the 6700 miles motley fool deal three weeks ago and still no miles. Cannot be bothered chasing it up as the hastle is more expensive than the wasted $100. if AA points come I take the win and move on. This is the second item I have paid for that I would not otherwise buy if not for the points. So I think going forward I will only use AA store for things I want anyway and take the points as a bonus.