Two Stackable Promotions Mean American Airlines Miles for 1.98 Cents

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American Airlines is offering two stackable promotions for buying AAdvantage miles that allow miles to be purchased for as little as 1.98 cents:

• Get up to a 30% bonus on the miles you purchase until February 28, 2014.
• Get a 10% discount on the price of miles until tomorrow February 6, 2014.

How do these promotions stack? How do these promotions compare to previous Buy Miles sales? Is this a price at which you should speculatively buy American Airlines miles?

The miles bonus is tiered. To max it out and get a full 30% bonus, you need to buy exactly 40k + 12k or 60k + 18k miles.

This bonus is available through February 28, 2014. We’ve seen this same bonus from American Airlines several times recently.

That the bonus miles stack with a second promotion–a 10% discount on the miles price–is what makes this the best price I’ve seen on American Airlines miles.

Until 11 PM CT on February 6, 2014, American Airlines is offering a 10% discount on the purchase of AAdvantage miles.

Through a combination of these two promos, you can buy 78k miles (60k + 18k bonus) for $1,542.69, which is 1.98 cents per mile.

The second best deal is to buy 52k miles (40k + 12k bonus) for $1,040.13, which is 2.00 cents per mile.

The normal price for American Airlines miles is over 3 cents per mile. The normal price during 30% bonus promotions is a bit over 2.1 cents per mile. I haven’t seen a price below 2 cents per mile to buy American Airlines miles in the last two years.

This is still not a good enough price to speculatively buy miles. But this can be a good deal if three conditions are met:

1. You have found award space on American Airlines or its partners.
2. You have put that award space on a five-day courtesy hold by phone or on aa.com.
3. The award nets a higher cents-per-mile value than the cost of buying miles.

For instance, if you have an Explorer Award on hold that features a round-the-world business class trip for 150k miles, and you only have 98k miles in your account, buying the last 52k miles for $1,040 is probably a great deal.

Fine Print:

• AAdvantage accounts must be 14 days old to Buy, Share, or Gift miles.
• The transaction is processed by points.com, which means you will NOT get bonus points/miles for a travel or airfare purchase if you have a credit card that offers those bonus categories.