Ways to Earn AAdvantage Loyalty Points

AA uses a white label booking portal for hotels around the world that can earn as much as 10,000 Loyalty Points per night. You read that right. That rate will be for the more expensive hotels, but you can really stack up Loyalty Points quickly with AA hotels. Keep in mind, there’s two different tiers of earn rates - one for AA credit card holders and one for those who do not have an AA credit card. The earn rate rates for AA credit card holders are significantly higher, between 7-10x higher.

It’s important to note that booking through this portal facilitates an OTA-like booking which will mean you aren’t eligible to earn hotel points and/or utilize hotel loyalty benefits with a hotel loyalty program. So when staying at hotels without a loyalty program or a hotel brand you don’t care about, this is a great option to consider.

AA has 2 premium credit cards that also earn 1 Loyalty Point per $1 spent on the card, but both of these come with additional incentives to earn even more loyalty points. These cards come with higher annual fees and additional perks.

AA Citi Executive: This card includes an Admirals Club membership, a slew of additional perks, and the ability to earn an additional 20,000 Loyalty Points. You can earn 10,000 Loyalty Points for spending $40,000 in the program year and another 10,000 Loyalty Points for earning 90,000 overall Loyalty Points in the entire program.

AA Barclays Silver AAviator: This card has a lower annual fee than the card above because it doesn’t include Admirals Club access, but it does come with a slew of other interesting perks like a daily food & beverage credit on domestic flights. The anual fee also sits in between the more traditional AA cards and the AA Citi Executive card. This card also allows you to earn up to an additional 15,000 loyalty points by spending on the card. You’ll earn 5,000 Loyalty Points at each milestone of spending $20,000, $40,000, and $50,000. The only catch with this card is you can’t apply for it straight away - you must have the Barclays Red Aviator card and be offered the upgrade from Barclays. You can read more about that in this blog post here.

The great news is you can earn both of these spend based bonuses for a total of up to 35,000 Loyalty Points per year.

AAVacations is a site exclusive to AA loyalty members which allows AA to offer bulk airfare and more competitive deals on hotels and car rentals when buying multiple products in the same transaction. When you see an asterisk next to the fare code on the flight details, these flights will earn based on a distance based chart posted here, which can be lucrative on competitively priced itineraries. Checkout this blog post to dive deeper into the deals you can get, when this makes sense, and when it doesn’t make sense.

A partnership between Mastercard and AA allow you to earn additional miles at select merchants simply by enrolling in an offer and using a linked Mastercard credit card on the SimplyMiles site. These offers are transient so always check back frequently! These miles post as base miles which means they’ll count as Loyalty Points.

Plastiq is a fintech company that allows you to pay certain types of bills with a credit card and in turn will mail a check or direct deposit the funds to the entity you’re paying. They charge a fee for this, around 2.9%, but this allows you to rack up Loyalty Points for one of your largest expenditures every year. Depending on how much you value your time, AA miles, and your redemption patterns, the fee could be a wash or even a net positive. Plus, if you sign up with this link and utilize Plastiq for $2,500 or more in the first 30 days, you can get $1,000 worth of fee-free payments on Plastiq. Read more on our blog here.

Flying any of the Oneworld partners will earn Loyalty Points with a few minor exceptions which are listed under each partner’s page here. These flights will earn based on a combination of the flight’s distance and the fare code you purchased as outlined on AA’s site for each partner. For routes where you have a choice between an AA codeshare or the partner’s code, you can learn more about optimizing that decision at this blog post here.

Please note, flying BA or IB will earn as it were an AA flight, base don ticket value.

AA has partnership with some of the bigger car rental companies that allow you to earn between 1-5 Loyalty Points per $1 of spend or even up to 50 Loyalty Points per day. It depends on the brand but you can learn more at this blog post.

The federal government offers below market rate credit card fees (under 2%) when paying your federal taxes online which incorporating the value of the mile you’d come out ahead on the processing fees (if you value a mile at $0.02 or higher).

In addition to federal taxes, depending on where you live, you may also be able to pay your state income taxes or even your property taxes with a credit card too! While everybody values their AA miles and time differently, paying a processing fee could be worth the Loyalty Points you’d get in return!