If you were a member of the American Airlines AAdvantage SimplyMiles offer, you will be honored for your purchases by 10am Eastern time on Tuesday, December 14, 2021. This. Is. It was amazing.
The original post and updates on the SimplyMiles offers are here. The deal was pulled on Tuesday, December 14th. It is no longer active.
I have been feeling more confident that American Airlines and Mastercard were working out the details of how to honor the deal. If they didn't intend to honor this, I expected that word to come sooner as it takes a writer a lot less time to draft a statement than it does to negotiate the cost of a transaction worth millions of airline miles.
Confirmation that the deal is done came today. American Airlines released a statement to Gary.
Those customers who activated the SimplyMiles 5X promotion and made purchases and donations by 10 a.m. will be credited with AAdvantage accounts with miles. On Tuesday, December 14, 2021. We are excited that members can use the SimplyMiles platform to earn AAdvantage miles.
That is amazing and I think the answer is correct. The SimplyMiles site stopped functioning at 10am central time on Tuesday, with most people unable to log in, and even on an account where I was, I couldn't sync offers. The promotion was over by 11am.
If you ordered a meal kit from Blue Apron or a computer from Best Buy, your credit card may not be charged until after the promotion is over, but that's not a big deal. I'm just making an educated guess, but I'm pretty sure that those items for which a charge was not yet finalized to your card may be out of luck.
The headline offer here was to donate a total of 240 miles per dollar to the charity. My wife made a donation of $5,000 on Saturday the 11th and I made another donation on Monday the 13th after American Airlines confirmed the deal to View from the Wing, so we are expecting 1.5 million American Airlines miles between those donations and the deal. That will represent a nice slush fund of miles at a price of 0.4166c per mile.
There are several key things that I think about this deal.
The iron is hot. When a deal sounds too good to be true, you need to jump immediately. There was a risk that this wouldn't work, but in many cases the risk was minimal and the reward was huge, especially for those considering relatively small donations.
It's worth it to read the comments. On the show, we mention that the 240x angle was identified in the comments soon after publication, and that we discussed the rationale behind not headline the offer when we first published. I found out that Bougie Miles highlighted the offer before anyone else on Friday, December 10th.
It is worth signing up everyone in your family for a loyalty program. The charity deal was not seen by new users immediately. The deal lasted long enough for me to get in on it, but it may have died sooner. It makes sense to make sure that everyone is signed up for this stuff because you never know when a smoking deal is going to happen.
Sometimes programs do the right thing. We have become accustomed to loyalty programs devaluing or not honoring promotions as anticipated, but American Airlines and Mastercard showed that they understood the right thing to do and a willingness to do it. It's nice to see that they got it done.
This was an incredible opportunity. Those who got in scored American Airlines miles at less than half a cent per mile.
It is wonderful to see that opportunity honored. It reminds me of the crazy offer from Iberia a couple of years ago. It was an offer where the deal was clear but many skeptics questioned it because it sounded too good to be true, yet it was honored. Those who hustle to get on a deal while the gettin' is good will get more opportunities with the American Airlines SimplyMiles offer.
