A few days ago, I taught you how to use American Airlines AAdvantage miles and elite status for car rentals. Now, I will show you how to use American Airlines AAdvantage miles and elite status for hotel rooms. Even though I am a Starwood Platinum member and stay mostly in Starwood hotels, I still look at useaamiles.com for price comparisons. You should only redeem your miles if you have American Airlines Platinum or Executive Platinum status because you get a HUGE discount when logged in.
I value 1 American Airlines AAdvantage mile at a minimum of 2 cents each. In my book, anything over 2 cents is considered a great redemption since I am overflowing with American Airlines miles. At #FTUDC last weekend, we were taught to Learn, Earn, and Burn. I fly over 100,000 miles on American Airlines a year to maintain Executive Platinum status. Ever since the new Elite Awards chart came out, I am leaning towards flying over 150,000 miles on American Airlines this year. With 150,000 miles flown and a 100% bonus on all flights taken due to being an EXP, I will earn 300,000 American Airlines miles this year. With the new Elite Awards, I will gain an additional 100,000 miles on top of that if I choose all the “Miles” within all the milestones. With 400,000 redeemable miles in the bank this year, I value that at a minimum of $8,000. Now you can see why I always use these valuable American miles for hotels and car rental redemptions.
For example, I’m looking for a SPG hotel in Las Vegas for the night of October 11, 2013. I plug in my search dates on SPG.com and it returned a rate of $159.00 for the Westin Las Vegas Hotel, Casino and Spa.
A close look at the $159 with taxes turns out to be $200.42.
I searched on useaamiles.com and turned out the hotel is offering a redemption of 8,300 American AAdvantage miles. When you redeem with miles on AA, you don’t pay the additional taxes you see on spg.com.
It’s a great redemption at 2.4 cent per mile which is above my minimum valuation of 2 cents per mile. I would never redeem 16,000 Starpoints at the Westin Las Vegas! 8,300 AAdvantage miles is a bargain.
For my second example, I’m looking for a SPG hotel in the Big Island of Hawaii for the night of June 14, 2013. I plug in my search dates on SPG.com and it returned a rate of $179.00 for the Sheraton Kona Resort & Spa at Keauhou Bay.
A close look at the $179 with taxes turns out to be $234.25.
I searched on useaamiles.com and turned out the hotel is offering a redemption of 12,500 American AAdvantage miles. When you redeem with miles on AA, you don’t pay the additional taxes you see on spg.com.
It’s a 1.9 cents per mile redemption which is close to my bare minimum valuation of 2.0 cents per mile, but when you’re swimming in AA miles, it’s still a great value to use the miles. If you have elite status with Starwood, I wrote a guide on how to receive elite benefits on a Starwood third party reservation.
I would highly advise you to play around with the useaamiles.com website to leverage your AAdvantage elite status and make your AAdvantage miles go further with hotel redemptions.