There’s a new way to redeem your American Airlines miles, and it doesn’t involve taking a flight.
As of Tuesday, the Fort Worth, Texas-based carrier now offers American Airlines AAdvantage redemptions for concert, theater and sporting event tickets booked through the AAdvantage Events portal. Mileage redemptions can fully offset the cost of an event ticket or be combined with cash in 1,000-mile increments.
The new functionality is already live on the AAdvantage Events portal, but it’s a bit tricky to find the redemption option.
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After searching for tickets, you need to find your desired event and then proceed to the checkout page. (This portal is operated in partnership with Ticketmaster, so you should be able to see most standard and resale ticket options that Ticketmaster offers.) The search results will display how many miles you’d earn if you paid in cash, but you’ll want to ignore that figure if you’re planning to redeem miles.
If you wish to redeem miles, you’ll need to enter your AAdvantage number on the contact information page.
Once you get to the payment screen, you’ll notice a new tab offering the “Redeem Miles” feature. From there, you can manually input how many miles you want to redeem to offset the ticket cost.
Note that nonverified resale tickets or tickets from affiliated sites linked to Ticketmaster are always grayed out and cannot be purchased through AAdvantage Events.
As for whether this redemption option makes sense, for most travelers, the answer will likely be no.
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American told TPG that the redemption rates will be consistent across different events, but AAdvantage status members and American cobranded credit card members will see more favorable redemption rates.
As an AAdvantage Executive Platinum member and cobranded credit card holder myself, I took a look at the redemption rates for some upcoming New York Yankees games.
The AAdvantage portal showed that all redemptions — whether they were done outright as a mix of cash and miles or as miles-only purchases — resulted in a 1 cent per mile rate.
Then, I repeated the same searches for my wife, who has no status or American credit cards, and her rates were 0.9 cents per mile.
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TPG’s July 2024 valuations peg American miles at 1.55 cents apiece. Given this valuation, most travelers will lose out by using miles for tickets. But, if you have a massive surplus of miles or are looking for a good use of a few thousand orphaned miles, this could be a great option.
After all, more choices are always better than fewer. (And American seemingly knows this because the carrier has been busy adding other nonflight redemptions, such as Wi-Fi packages, in recent months.)
As for me, I’m just holding out hope that the forthcoming Oneworld alliance mileage upgrade program will be a bit more valuable than this latest redemption option.
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