Chasing AA Status with 0 Flying

I’m going to do something either really crazy or really dumb. With American Airlines announcing their shift to loyalty points for elite status, I’m going to try and see if I can earn top tier American Status with 0 flights in 2022.

Before I go into detail about how I plan on achieving this goal, I am located on the West Coast near Silicon Valley where American flights are more expensive and less convenient that United. In addition, unlike other members of the travel community, I never travel for my job. All of my flights are for vacations or for visiting friends and family. As a result, it would be near impossible for me to earn any type of airline elite status by flying so I figured let’s try to earn top tier status without flying. Here’s how I plan to do it!

Leveraging Shopping Portals

I operate several small businesses on the side and often purchase goods or supplies online. I plan on leveraging American Advantage Shopping when possible. I can earn anywhere from 1-10 miles on most purchases . Shopping portals are a great way to stack on rewards when online shopping. I never shop online without using a shopping portal.

In addition, I also hope to leverage shopping portal offers to earn additional miles when possible. I most recently took advantage of the Spring Forward Bonus where I earned an additional 1,000 miles for spending $300 during the promotional period, but I’m pretty sure they won’t count as loyalty points. I also took advantage of a 2,000 mile offer for a Hello Fresh box so I could have a quick dinner last week.

AA Advantage Dining

While the program is hit or miss, there are some restaurants on the American Airlines Dining program that I do regularly visit. I hope to leverage the dining program to double dip rewards when visiting some of regular restaurants. The program is also currently offering a 1,000 mile bonus for spending $25 on an order within the first 30 days of signup. I hope to take advantage of this offer pretty soon, but be sure to only go for the instore offers. When attempting to order online via the portal, I noticed that prices online were a bit higher than normal even for instore pickup which seems to be the norm when using a third party app. I’m thinking leveraging the dining bonuses could net me somewhere between 1-3k loyalty points for the year.

Credit Card Sign-up Bonus

No the 70,000 bonus miles you get from meeting a sign up bonus will not net you a single loyalty point. On the other hand, the minimum spend requirement will allow you earn loyalty points and I hope to open a few American Airlines credit cards this year making this another way to add some loyalty points and American miles. I will most likely open at least 2 cards this year and spend at least 10k which should get me a minimum of 10,000 loyalty points in 2022.

Simply Miles

This is similar to Amex/Chase offers but for American Airlines members with a mastercard? I’m not 100% how this works but there are plenty of data points to suggest that Simply Miles is another awesome method to double or triple stack your points. I will be giving this a try pretty soon since I recently opened an American Airlines credit card, but in my game plan I will omit using Simply Miles.

Recap

Overall, at a bare minimum I could spend 200k on my American Airlines credit card to earn top tier American status. Instead, I will be leveraging a combination of shopping portals, special offers, and the dining portal in an attempt to earn top tier status. I hope to give a monthly update pretty soon, but right now I’m pretty far behind.