“You can earn 200 miles per survey and the miles will transfer to your AAdvantage account within 4-6 weeks”.

45 surveys and fingers crossed.

Sign up for blue apron, factor, and hello fresh through the aadvantage eshopping portal (create a new email if you have to for these subscriptions) and purchase one box each then keep the subscription active for 90 days, skipping all weeks you don’t want those meals. They typically post within 2-3 days of first box purchase. Also if you have an aviator card, activate the hello fresh simply miles offer (if you have it) and double dip on hello fresh points (triple if your CC statement posts before you need to book the flight).

Other options: motley fool has generally high reward amounts (but comes with a ton of marketing emails). If you like point deals, a $100 PointsYeah! Subscription nets 2500 miles. If you need a new laptop, a Microsoft store purchase of $1000 on surface for ~10,000 miles on simplymiles (not sure if that shows for everyone or if simplymiles is personalized). Look for other spring extra miles on the eshopping portal and do the math on if it’s cheaper than spending $300 on miles. Buying miles is typically the worst bang for your buck, but if you have to take the trip that may be your best option.

Buying miles is always a terrible deal. 0/10. Would not advise. Much better to use something like the AA e-shopping portal. Still won’t be ‘instant.’

Man it’s hit or miss. I have repeat shopped at some and it was the next day and others I had to use support to get miles

The AA hotels are good, they post after your booking dates are done.

Aadvantage Hotels is the way. I am based in Bangkok and not taking any flights until this summer. I have 35,000 loyalty points through credit card spend and three hotel stays (7 nights total). The hotel stays account for 27,000 of the 35,000 points.

AA shopping is a good second option to just booking a short weekend flight.

You could also open up an AA credit card which has some conditional bonus points, but might take a while for those to go through once you meet the criteria.

Surveys

Buy them

aa shopping app, and buy your groceries from walmart and pick them up. You were going to do that anyways.

AADining.

> ensuring anyone can effortlessly earn and redeem miles without having to apply for a travel credit card with high annual fees and strict FICO score requirements

Most here don’t mind AFs in exchange for a large SUB and most here don’t have any issues with their credit score.

Since you're asking for it... I don't think this is the right audience for you.

1. Most of us here have very strong feelings in that we prefer to book hotels and plane tickets directly, rather than through portals such as expedia. When anything goes wrong, it's much better if you booked direct. I would much rather deal with an airline than with you honestly because I know what I'm getting with Delta. I have no clue what I'm getting with you.

2. Building on #1, most of us have status with all the hotel chains. So we get things like early check ins, late check outs, free breakfasts, etc. Status perks don't come from third party bookings.

3. Many of us here don't want the earning and burning process to become easier. Easier means more competition which means less of the pie for me.

4. We all have excellent credit here. Advertising that you can earn miles without needing excellent credit is going to fall onto deaf ears.

5. I and I'm sure many other users here already have systems that works very well for us. Many of us have millions of miles across programs. Why would anyone want to disrupt that to mess around with your universe?

6. There is no way that you're giving people 25 miles per dollar spend to book hotels and then at the same time having a mile worth 2 cpp to redeem. You can't make money if you're giving 50% back in rewards.

7. Amex/Chase/Citi/Capital One have a record of consistency in their programs. They have trust from the consumer. You do not. If your program is as good of a deal as you say it is, you'll be forced to devalue it many times before your backers get bankrupted.

Ignore the haters, I’ve been looking for an OTA that passes back the majority of their commission and this is the closest we’re ever gonna get to that. It seems like the clever trick here is that you’re rebating the commission in an opaque currency instead of dollars, which if true is quite the loophole.

This is not really the right audience for this message as a lot of them tend to enjoy paying a little bit more for the nicer travel experience especially with hotels (for example, a lot of the most active members would much rather transfer 15k UR for a Hyatt than cash it out and pay $100 for a cheap but still nice room). See all the posts about business class flights, etc. Hotel loyalty programs are yet another rebate program, one that this sub and r/awardtravel are obsessed with making work. You just need to beat the ~15% rebate top statuses get at these hotels (very easy with the 20-30%+ commissions OTAs can take) by a sufficient margin to forgo booking direct.

But I think you really have something interesting here. I’m surprised that flight bookings don’t have commissions, how do the portals make money?

If there are any other major areas of commerce where middlemen take massive commissions then that’s where you should be expanding next. OTA and online shopping are the major ones, I’m sure others exist and you just need to find them.

We're not held back by being a credit card. For many bank travel portals, for example, they could give you 2-3 times higher earning rates than they currently do, but they have to make up for the fact that they often pay billions more in rewards than they receive in swipe fees. We're just giving our commission back to you in miles, and eventually it'll be cheaper for us to do it at scale.

most people who aren't in the "points game" tend to believe that it's too complicated to earn / build up all of these points the optimal way.

once you actually are in the game, you realize earning is the easy part. burning points is the hard part.

As a professional pilot, I love the luggage but the follow up customer service is TERRIBLE!!! Try to go thru the automated process and it ends up forcing you to BUY. Try and talk with someone, they give you links to websites that force you to BUY! I have been trying for MONTHS to just get information about my Rollerbag and I have run into issue after issue. All TravelPro cares about are SALES, NOT customers!!!

It’s all about the sign up bonuses. You can get 70-100k points for $1-6k in spend. Rinse and repeat. It’s easy (increasingly harder, but still relatively easy) to rack up hundreds of thousands or millions of points this way. R/churning if you want more info. Have to stay on top of your accounts tho, paying off all the way and no missed payments. Sounds like you’ve been responsible enough to dip a toe in.  If you’re interested, start small and see how it goes. 

First class to Japan can be had (with much effort, at 1 year out) for 150-300k roundtrip + $500 in fees per ticket. 150k for low season ANA, this means that pretty much with one card you can get enough miles for a first class roundtrip - but then the problem becomes actually getting the ticket - much more competition nowadays than previously. Still, it's possible - I do it every year.

You can score some great deals to other places too, just requires research and effort.

First of all: Please stop using zero interest cards the way you're using them. Buying things on a card because you don't have the cash is dangerous. You've been lucky so far, but I wouldn't press it anymore if I were you.

Moving on to miles and cashback:

> But at 5% cash back to get $1,000 worth of points you would have to spend $20,000. Is that it? All the people that say they regularly fly first class because of their points and stay at the hotels for free, they just spent 100k a year and that's how they get enough points?

Yes. That is precisely it. You can optimize it a little and churn SUBs (sign up bonuses), but at the end of the day you need to spend money to get miles or cashback. Most of the people who fly business class using miles get those miles from business expenditures, either from a business they own or by paying for their employer's expenses and then getting reimbursed later.

Don't pay attention to social media influencers or websites like Nerdwallet and Frequent Miler, the kind of lifestyle they peddle is wholly irrelevant to most people.

So points can usually be redeemed in multiple ways. Some of those ways are way more valuable than cash back, some are about the same, and some are less valuable. The credit card company is relying on the fact that most people don't redeem their points in the optimal way.  

Let's take my Amex Gold card as an example: It earns 4 points per dollar at restaurants and grocery stores. If I just redeem those points for cash (given out as statement credits), the value is 0.6¢ per point (ccp). If I go on the Amex travel portal and redeem the points for hotels or airfare, the value is usually between 0.6 to 1 ccp.  And if I transfer the points to an airline partner my points can easily be worth 1.5 ccp and up; sometimes way more for international business class flights.  

Amex says that most people redeem their points for statement credits, which is why they can afford people like me who never redeem points unless the value is at least 1.5 ccp.

Wife and I both travel for work and use personal credit cards to pay for it that are later reimbursed by work.

Wife spent ~$150K on Delta Amex and I spent ~$40K on a Hilton card. Plus we are brand loyal so we fly Delta and stay Hilton almost exclusively.

We generated enough points to fly Delta One round trip to Hawaii and stay a week in a Hilton property. We are working on enough points to fly roundtrip to Germany later this year and get most of the hotels covered as well.

Could we have taken the cash instead? Absolutely. But cash gets lost in the accounts and its a lot more fun to take 'free' vacations a couple times a year.

https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/122314/credit-card-rewards-cash-back-vs-airline-miles.asp

Chase has a 5/24 rule (you can only get 5 new cards within any 24 month period). Other banks have similar rules where they’ll start rejecting your card applications when you have too many, even if you’re otherwise qualified.

As far as credit score, it won’t matter for most people.

Sign up for aashopping and get the motley fool subscription for $80. Gets you 6200 LPs in a few days.

I'm actually fascinated because I've never heard of a challenge like this, only the opportunity to purchase the miles back. This seems like a far better way to engage the customer. I'm always earning miles so I've never had this issue.

aashopping and aadining. Stop using amazon and start using walmart. Any store on aa shopping, start buying through that instead.

Stand on a corner

Did blue apron. The account has to be active for 42 days before points post. I’m about 30 days in…..

As entertrainer7 alluded to, use the AA shopping portal. The Motley Fool subscription offers the best bang-for-buck (by far), but there are hundreds of "normal" stores to choose from too. Points generally post in about a week.

Credit cards receive 1 loyalty point per $1 spent. Even if the spend category receives a multiplier, it’s only 1 loyalty point per $1.

If you have the aviator red card and can upgrade to silver, you can get 15,000 bonus loyalty points by spending a lot of money. The Executive be platinum card also gets up to 20,000 bonus loyalty points once you hit certain benchmarks earning loyalty points. If you intend to do all of your spending on AA cards, the Silver and Executive combo is the way to go, with most of the spending going on the Silver.

You also should use SimplyMiles and the Aadvantage shopping portal to earn more loyalty points. You can use Aadvantage hotels, but I prefer to use the Hyatt reciprocal earnings (1 point per $1 spent at Hyatt).

AAdvantageHotels.com

Sometimes you can earn more miles per dollar than flights if you look in the right places.

Ultra long haul business class. I knocked out over 150k LP on a recent itinerary, however, at an extortionate cost.

But really, it all comes down to spending $

AA Shopping has a Motley Fool subscription deal now. 6700 miles for $100 subscription. For some reason, I got 8,040 loyalty points (20% bonus) on the transaction.

Get an American Airlines credit card and book your hotels through aadvantagehotels.com. Just having the credit card attached to your advantage number will get you 5x miles/points. If you have at least Gold status on American along with the credit card, you will earn 10x miles/points. I’m a new business traveler trying to build status from scratch. Just got the card last week and already I am earning 3,000 - 5,000 points on hotel stays I would have booked anyway. Premium hotel stays will earn you up to 10k points for a 2-3 day stay. If you have the cc and status, you can earn up to 15k points in a single stay.

I tend to mentally plan for two trips per year, and ideally one is the big trip on points, and the other is a smaller domestic trip that's cash based.

Credit card bonuses are the easiest way to earn points quickly without doing manufactured spend, and honestly, travel is a expensive hobby even if you're playing with points, so you'll have to consider if you have the fiscal capacity to burn 1M worth of points per year, let alone earn nearly that much from bonuses. I'm single so 4X spend at supermarkets can only do so much to earn the points needed for business class to East Asia. So I do try to hit a few bonuses here and there in the fall and winter to coincide with Christmas shopping and oil heat deliveries.

Check out /r/churning for more info if you’re truly interested. It has a good wiki.

And you’re right, most people aren’t accruing that many points from just average spend. A large portion of this community uses CC bonuses to earn.

But there are a good chunk of people out there who have businesses or other means (Google “Manufactured spend”) to accrue points at a higher rate.

It requires a good amount of effort but is worth it IMO

I earn and burn about 1M per year give or take (with P2 we hit about 6-8 new cards per year total)

Key is husband and wife team up on points… sent from Italy

A lot of people here are high earners/spenders or have businesses that allow them to accumulate a crap ton of points.

I make like around 90k a year, I travel internationally once a year but take around a month off. I prefer long terms over short ones. My main way of accruing points is just sign up bonuses. I do get luckily sometimes by referring family members, but that's rare for me. At most from my usually spend I get like an extra ~$300 in travel points from normal spending. For regular folk, the only way is honestly just churning.