🐳 Points Whales: Best uses of AA miles

Estimated read time: 4 minutes and 18 seconds

Good morning from beautiful Sarajevo, Bosnia & Herzegovina, and welcome back to another edition of Daily Drop.

Today, we’ve got a way to rack up points, a way to burn a bunch of points, and more. So, let’s get to it:

• 🏨 Earn 90,000 bonus Hyatt points (targeted)

• ✈️ Points Whales: 1 million+ AA miles

• 🎙️Should you get this secret Marriott card?

🏨 Earn 90,000 bonus Hyatt points (targeted)

Holy poop. There’s a new targeted offer floating around for Hyatt members that is offering a whopping 90,000 bonus Hyatt points if maximized.

That’s bonkers, folks…

Here are the details:

If you register for the offer, you’ll earn a crap load of bonus Hyatt points based on how many nights you stay during the 90 days after registering.

To be clear, you’d need to stay a LOT of nights to fully maximize the promotion…

But still, even the lower tiers of bonus points are meaningful.

As you can see, the first five nights effectively earn 1,000 bonus points per night.

On the higher end, your final ten nights will earn you 3,500 bonus points per night.

At this point, it would be worth mattress running those last ten nights at a hotel like this one in Houston, which only costs 3,500 points per night.

If you did this, those ten nights would effectively be free (spending 3,500 points per night but earning 3,500 bonus points per night).

The benefit would be that you’d rack up more Hyatt Milestone Rewards, which can unlock even more points, guest of honor awards, suite upgrades, or even free night awards.

Of course, the huge caveat is that this offer is targeted…

Still, you can easily click this link, enter your Hyatt loyalty number, and see if you’ve been targeted.

The nice part of this promo is that you don’t need to max out the offer to earn some solid points.

Earning 1,000 or 2,000 bonus points per night is still a huge win if you ask me 😎

✈️ Points Whales: 1 million+ AA miles

About a month ago, I wrote about a “Points Whale” in our community who had a stash of JetBlue miles.

I asked y’all to write in if you were a fellow “points whale” with a huge stash of a single points currency.

We had a lot of replies… y’all are some serious whales.

But one of them struck me - mostly with envy. Because one of you is sitting on a stash of over one million American Airlines miles. 🤯😱

So today, I’ll break down some of the ways that I would use a large stash of AA miles and some of the more valuable ways to redeem them.

One of the most obvious ways to use AA miles is with AA itself.

Unlike some of the other domestic programs, American actually has some amazing redemption rates for its own flights.

So if traveling around the U.S. is your game, one million AA miles is enough to comfortably fly many dozens of times, always in first class, and not burn down your stash for a long, long time.

But there are other creative ways to use AA miles.

For example, AA has some of the best rates for booking Etihad business and first-class awards.

You can fly from New York to Abu Dhabi in Etihad first class for 115,000 AA miles.

Obviously, that’s a lot of miles… but hey, you’re a points whale. You can afford it.

Booking aspirational flights like this and still having a huge balance left over is one of the best ways to take advantage of your stash.

But if you want to experience the luxury of first class without spending so many miles, you could also just book Qatar Qsuites with AA miles.

Qsuites is Qatar’s business-class product, but it feels like first class.

AA lets you travel from cities like Chicago to the Middle East on Qatar for just 70,000 miles in business class, including in Qsuites:

You could fly a route like this a dozen times and still have a couple hundred thousand miles left over…

Of course, there are endless other ways to use AA miles if you’re into international travel, including:

• Tokyo to Bangkok on Japan Airlines business class for 30,000 miles

• London to Johannesburg in business class for 55,000 miles

• Sydney to Los Angeles on Qantas in business class for 65,000 miles

So, while AA miles are harder to earn, they are generally more valuable than most other miles.

The rest of you can get cracking on building up a stash of your own by applying for co-branded cards.

Be sure to reach out if you are a fellow points whale and want tips on using a big stash of points or miles! 🐳

This week on The Daily Drop Podcast, I reveal a secret card that nobody can apply for… but anyone can get 👀

You can tell by the thumbnail that this card is part of the Marriott brand, but just how good is it??

I’ll explain how you can get the card, what Marriott benefits it comes with, and whether or not it makes sense to add it to your wallet.

If the suspense is killing you, and you’re dying to find out, you can listen here or watch on YouTube 😎

That’s all for today, folks! It’s always nice to have ways to both earn huge stacks of points and use them effectively, so I hope you enjoyed today’s tips!

For now, take care and I’ll see you tomorrow to finish off the week.

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