![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
canyonwalkerRecently I realized that my American Airlines Aadvantage balance had reached over 972,000 miles— nearly a million! The most recent boost came from the latest AA-affiliated credit card I opened three months ago. As I've explained many times before, carrying a huge balance with points programs is a bad idea— and nearly 1 million definitely puts the "ug" in "huge". 🤣
An opportunity to take a bit off the top appeared yesterday morning when I was doing my airline book-o-rama. I found a deal on CLT-SFO tickets for just 10,500 miles each (one-way). That's a steal as flights haven't been that cheap in... well, practically forever. Even the days of 12.5k one-way/25k round-trip are over a decade behind us at this point.
To be sure, taking 21k off the top of 972k does not materially change the risk of carrying such a huge balance. It also doesn't set me far back from topping 1.0 million. ...Not that that's actually a goal, or anything. It's just something that would be amusing to log into my account and see.
You might recall the many times I've written about Million Miler status with United and wonder why I'm not more excited about this. These are not the same. With American I have nearly 1 million redeemable miles. On United I earned over 1 million elite qualifying miles. What's the difference? Elite miles come primarily from butt-in-seat travel. Redeemable miles can come from partner activity, like using the airline's affiliated credit card. Indeed most of my nearly 1 million AA miles are from the nearly dozen AA credit cards I've owned over the past 20 years. AA does have a million miler program like UA, and I do have lifetime miles in it... but fewer than 300k, versus my now 1.2 million with United.
That aside, I really do need to spend more of these still-nearly 1 million AA miles. I aim for this pair of cheap one-way tickets home from Charlotte, North Carolina in August to be just the tip of the iceberg.
An opportunity to take a bit off the top appeared yesterday morning when I was doing my airline book-o-rama. I found a deal on CLT-SFO tickets for just 10,500 miles each (one-way). That's a steal as flights haven't been that cheap in... well, practically forever. Even the days of 12.5k one-way/25k round-trip are over a decade behind us at this point.To be sure, taking 21k off the top of 972k does not materially change the risk of carrying such a huge balance. It also doesn't set me far back from topping 1.0 million. ...Not that that's actually a goal, or anything. It's just something that would be amusing to log into my account and see.
You might recall the many times I've written about Million Miler status with United and wonder why I'm not more excited about this. These are not the same. With American I have nearly 1 million redeemable miles. On United I earned over 1 million elite qualifying miles. What's the difference? Elite miles come primarily from butt-in-seat travel. Redeemable miles can come from partner activity, like using the airline's affiliated credit card. Indeed most of my nearly 1 million AA miles are from the nearly dozen AA credit cards I've owned over the past 20 years. AA does have a million miler program like UA, and I do have lifetime miles in it... but fewer than 300k, versus my now 1.2 million with United.
That aside, I really do need to spend more of these still-nearly 1 million AA miles. I aim for this pair of cheap one-way tickets home from Charlotte, North Carolina in August to be just the tip of the iceberg.
