How I was able to earn 11,000 AAdvantage miles and Loyalty Points by buying an iPad on AAdvantage eShopping

On June 26, for one day only, the AAdvantage eShopping Mall offered a wonderful deal of 10x miles on iPads purchased that day from Apple.com.

It just so happened that I needed a new iPad Pro. I had been eyeing one for quite a while now. Plus, I already made up my mind that I’d be driving to Oregon from Seattle to buy one on the July 4th weekend. (There is no sales tax in Oregon, allowing me to save 10% off what I’d have to pay in Washington.)

It was just my luck that I was going to order one anyway. And it looked like the iPad Pro was not in the exclusion list in the terms and conditions of the offer. So I went ahead and bought it on June 26 and scheduled a pickup for July 2 at one of the Apple Stores in Portland.

How it works

The reason they are able to offer miles for my purchases is because Apple will pay affiliates for redirecting traffic to them. As long as I start my purchase at AAdvantageEShopping.com instead of going directly to Apple.com, Apple considers the affiliate to be AAdvantage eShopping. Then, AAdvantage eShopping will pay me back a certain number of miles.

Typically, I only get 1 mile per dollar spent. I would have bought using the AAdvantage eShopping method anyway, but the 10 miles per dollar offer meant I had to act fast before the deal went away.

EPP

I currently work for Microsoft, so I am eligible for the Microsoft EPP offer at Apple. (Yes, that’s ironic, but we really do get a small discount for Apple products, I promise!) That would knock down my purchase price by $22 to $1,077 before tax. However, if I purchased from the EPP store, I wouldn’t be eligible for the AAdvantage miles. Losing roughly 11,000 miles is not worth the $22 in savings. I also needed to buy accessories for my iPad, but they wouldn’t qualify for the 10 miles per dollar offer. Thus, I only bought my Apple Pencil and Magic Keyboard from the EPP store. The dollar savings on those were much more significant than the AAdvantage eShopping offer, which was only 1 mile per dollar.

Value

How much value did I get out of this?

• 10,990 AAdvantage miles (worth $194.52 according to The Points Guy’s valuations of AAdvantage miles at 1.77¢ per mile). That’s a 21% return!
• $32.97 in Daily Cash from my Apple Card (3% back for purchases at Apple)

That makes my effective savings on this a total of $227.49 back on a $1,099 purchase! (Plus I saved roughly $110 on Washington sales tax!)

The most important value from this purchase is the number of Loyalty Points I’ll get from this purchase. This will be a huge boost in my annual requalification for AAdvantage Platinum. (I’ve made my mind up that I will be going for this upcoming year too.) With this purchase, I’ll already be ¼ of the way to at least qualifying for AAdvantage Gold. The threshold for AAdvantage Gold for the 2024 qualification year is 40,000 Loyalty Points.

The most obvious way to get Loyalty Points is to fly on American Airlines. Mileage earnings are now fully revenue-based for all flights operated by AA. Thus, it only matters how much I spend on a flight. Typically I spend $500 on a round trip ticket. Assuming that doesn’t include taxes, I’d earn 8 miles per dollar spent as an AAdvantage Platinum member. That only brings me to 4,000 miles for that flight. Meanwhile, I can get a tangible item that was already going to buy and get an extra 11,000 miles. This is awesome!

Moral of the story is: watch out for these deals, make those non-time sensitive purchases when the time is right, and you just might be rewarded handsomely for your patience and calculation.

P.S. This post was written from the very iPad that’s the subject of this post 🙂