AAdvantage Miles Expiry Extension and Purchase Miles Promotion During COVID-19

COVID-19 has been wreaking havoc on everything, and those who travel for leisure and travel have had numerous difficulties dealing with travel providers, especially airlines as they navigate these unprecedented times and circumstances. That being said, travelers do need to stay on top of their bookings to process cancellations and changes in a timely manner, including monitoring your accounts to make sure your miles do not expire. Find out how we kept our AAdvantage accounts active as Canadians for as little money as possible.

As our American Airlines AAvantage miles were set to expire on April 4, 2020 due to lack of activity in the last 18 months, we had this on our radar. We were hopeful our flights on Hawaiian Airlines would be credited to AAdvantage but the fare class we booked was not eligible and we did not feel there would be a good return on investment to pay an additional $60 per ticket for a 30 minute inter-island flight between the Big Island of Hawaii and Kauai.

In order to keep them from expiring, we credited a car rental in Portland to Jason’s AAdvantage account in February and we planned to transfer Marriott Bonvoy Miles to Maxine’s account. Based on the current rules, the minimum miles required to transfer to AAdvantage from Marriott Bonvoy is 3,000 miles at the rate of 3:1. We also considered purchasing points but to but to buy the minimum points was quite expensive; before the promo, it would have cost $82.94USD to purchase the minimum 2,000 miles. At this time though, there is a promotion that is quite generous to purchase AAdvantage miles and so some of you may want to assess the risk Vs reward of allocating cash to purchase miles for future use not knowing when travel will recover and what the future holds for the aviation industry as a result of COVID-19. We do feel buying miles is a good way to support the aviation industry in the hopes of keeping it afloat even if there are some risks and being aware that a good deal is hard to pass up but that everyone needs to assess their finances before making purchases like these.

Then, when we logged in to Maxine’s account, we noticed that the deadline to keep the account active had been extended by 6 months to October 4, 2020. We have not been able to find any information about this extension but welcome it! And this is also further incentive to make a small investment to purchase some AAdvantage points if not in the immediate future in a few months.

Since there was very little monetary cost to keeping our AAdvantage accounts active and based on the number of miles we have, it was a priority for us to hold on to them and depending how things go, we may purchase additional miles for future travel. We are still hopeful we might get to use the miles to fly Qatar Airways QSuites again in the future if that is an option.

Did you notice that your mile expiry for AAdvantage was extended for 6 months? Are you planning on buying any AAdvantage miles?

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