Tl;dr—American Airlines has launched a targeted promotion offering select AAdvantage Members the chance to gain meaningful status with the airline. This is a great opportunity to rack up the necessary loyalty points by booking hotel stays through AAdvantage Hotels.
If elite status with a major airline is on your 2025 wish list, check your American Airline’s AAdvantage account to see if you’re targeted for the airline’s latest promotion. Select members are invited to participate in this promotion. Unfortunately, I was not targeted for this promotion. I could have badly used it as I dropped from Executive Platinum to Gold at the turn of American Airlines’ qualification year. Shout out to Upgraded Points for putting this one on my radar.
Earn Enough Loyalty Points for One Status Tier and Level Up to the Next
There are a few different versions of this deal, all of which follow the same pattern – earn enough Loyalty Points (LPs) for one status tier and receive enough bonus loyalty points to bump up to the next one. In other words, if during the promotional period, you accrue 40,000 LPs (good enough for AAdvantage Gold), you’ll receive 35,000 additional LPs, which puts you well past the threshold for AAdvantage Platinum. If you don’t want the additional LPs, you can gift the status you’ve earned to another member instead. Here are the promotional offers targeted members have received:
- Earn 40,000 Loyalty Points (AAdvantage Gold) and receive 35,000 bonus Loyalty Points or gift Gold status.
- Earn 75,000 Loyalty Points (AAdvantage Platinum) and receive 50,000 bonus Loyalty Points or gift Platinum status.
- Earn 125,000 Loyalty Points (AAdvantage Platinum Pro) and receive 75,000 bonus Loyalty Points or gift Platinum Pro status.
Earning Platinum Pro is a big win here as it unlocks oneworld Emerald which provides solid cross-alliance benefits, including premium lounge access.
How to Easily Get the Loyalty Points You Need? Book Some Hotel Stays
If you have some upcoming travel and haven’t yet booked (or can change) your hotel, I’d recommend booking through the AAdvantage Hotels platform. This is essentially a white-labeled version of Rocketmiles and it’s been my preferred method for racking up tons of American Advantage Loyalty Points and AAdvantage Miles. I’ve written about this strategy in the past, so I won’t rehash it in detail here. A significant portion of the loyalty points I accrue come from booking hotels on this platform. Since the accompanying AAdvantage miles help book fun premium cabin redemptions on carriers like Japan Airlines and British Airways, it’s a no-brainer. AAdvantage Hotels is especially clutch if you’re looking at an independent hotel – one where you wouldn’t need to forgo the elite nights you’d accrue in a loyalty program. I’d even forgo 10-15 World of Hyatt or Marriott Bonvoy elite night credits (and the associated points earnings) to grab nearly two years of oneworld Emerald status.
What to Watch Out For?
Overpaying. While it’s common to see the hotels on AAdvantage Hotel’s listings offered at a slight premium over other booking channels, that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about AAdvantage Hotels showing a higher price to you depending on the platform you’re booking on (mobile vs. web) while baking into the higher price as a de facto purchase of additional loyalty points.
Here’s an example. I scouted hotels for an upcoming trip to wine country in California and searched the web and mobile AAdvantage Hotel sites. First, here are the web results.
$607 for a Superior Queen room at Wine and Roses in Lodi, CA. I will earn 10,000 Loyalty Points (and AAdvantage Miles) for this booking. Ok, let’s take a peek at the mobile results:
$249 a night for 1200 Loyalty Points/Miles (I am an AAdvantage credit cardholder) – a lot less than booking on the web, but notably, the SAME EXACT ROOM is $358 cheaper.
Now, let’s examine the cost of purchasing the difference in AAdvantage Miles between these two booking paths.
The difference is 8800 miles, so I rounded up to 9000. That’ll cost you $304.77, and you won’t earn LPs. That price point is suspiciously close to the difference between the rooms on mobile and the web, and the additional premium can probably be chalked up to the fact that the hotel booking would qualify as LPs.
This is an unnecessary overpay.
To avoid this, you’ll want to search both mobile and web and only go for properties where the LP earnings are the same. That way, you’ll know that when you’ve found your property of choice, you’re not unnecessarily overpaying just to ‘get more LPs”. There are high-earn-rate properties that aren’t priced at a premium.
Like I said, mind the gap!
