We are headed to Lake Tahoe for winter break, 2020. I found myself with a lot of American Airlines AAdvantage Miles because I recently took advantage of 2 lucrative AA bonus offers. First, I got the CitiBusiness/AAdvantage Platinum Select World MasterCard at the beginning of the year with a 70,000 mile bonus offer. Then, this past March, I got the Barclays AAdvantage Aviator Business Card and scored another 60,000 miles. The bonus offer now has a 75,000 mile potential-damn!
So, I had an easy 130,000 miles to start with. Also, my family all had various balances of AA miles and each leg of the trip to and from Reno was just 20,000 miles. So I scraped together a bunch of miles for one way tickets to secure the tickets I couldn’t get in my AA account for lack of miles.
In summary, each ticket in total was 40,000 American AAdvantage Miles. I thought that was pretty good for Feb break. However, one little catch-we are flying in and out of Philly. Sometimes, we use Philly when the price is much less than flying in and out of New York and this was the case here. The New York/Reno prices were much higher! We flew in and out of Philly back in 2018 when we went to Park City and we made do. Remember, traveling for free often requires flexibility.
The flights had we paid with money would have been $610 each. We saved $3,050 using AA miles.
How did I do in terms of value? American AAdvantage miles are valued at about 1.4 cents per mile. So for each ticket where I used 40,000 miles, I used $560 worth of value. Remember, each ticket would have been $610, so I actually gained some value here. Yay!
One last thing, I completely depleted my American Airlines AAdvantage account and unfortunately, I don’t have a lot of options to rebuild them. I am kind of tapped out on AA credit cards and unfortunately, American Airlines is not a transferee of many of the flexible rewards programs. Hmmm…it may be so long to American for awhile after this trip. TBD!