Generate up to 10,000 Avios, Miles, Points from just 0.49 cents each [Targeted]

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Note: There’s a disclaimer to this deal that I discuss in the article so make sure you read that before you decide whether to attempt to generate Avios/Miles/Points in the way that is discussed below.

Outside of credit card welcome bonuses, one of the easiest ways to boost a miles and points balance without going to much effort and without spending any money that you wouldn’t have otherwise spent is to make use of the various shopping portals which are operated on behalf of the major loyalty programs.

I love using these portals in my day-to-day life, and I especially love using them when I spot a way in which a deal they’re offering can be used in conjunction with one or more other deals to generate miles/points at a very economical rate.

One such opportunity is available right now, and as long as you hold an American Express credit card which has been targeted for a specific offer (an offer which appears to be widely available), you should be able to make the most of what I discuss below.

The deals that you need to stack

There are two offers that are key here:

1. A targeted Amex offer that gives a cardholder a $49 rebate on a Motley Fool subscription.
2. A shopping portal offer that gives a user a miles/points bonus for taking out a Motley Fool subscription.

The Amex offer looks like this …

… and I have this offer targeted to all my American Express cards (consumer and business cards).

The shopping portal offers vary depending on which loyalty program they’re affiliated to and the key ones offer between 3,800 and 10,000 Avios/miles/points.

How this works

The first thing that you’ll need to do is to load the targeted Amex offer to the card that will give you the best return on your Motley Fool spending.

In my case that involved loading the offer to card_name which earns me 2 points/dollar on the first $50,000 of spending every year (1 point/dollar thereafter – terms apply).

The next thing that you need to do is to select which shopping portal you’d like to use and to then head over there and find the Motley Fool deal that the portal is offering.

At the time of writing, this is what the key portals are offering:

• Alaska Mileage Plan – 4,500 miles
• American Airlines AAdvantage – 6,200 miles
• British Airways Executive Club – 10,000 Avios
• Delta SkyMiles – 3,800 miles
• Southwest Rapid Rewards – 4,300 points
• Chase Ultimate Rewards – 5,000 points

If you click through to the Motley Fool site from your selected portal, you’ll find that an annual subscription to the Motley Fool Stock Advisor costs $99 …

… but that’s a price that you should be able to bring down to just $49 by paying for the subscription with the Amex card to which you have saved the Motley Fool offer. This is key to getting a great deal on the Avios/Miles/Points that you generate.

The effective cost of the Avios/Miles/Points

If you plan to make the most of the Motley Fool subscription, the effective cost of any Avios/Miles/Points that you earn is zero because they’re just a bonus on top of the subscription that you’re using.

Most people reading this, however, will probably not use the subscription, so by handing over $49 (net) to the Motley Fool, they will be, effectively, paying $49 for whatever Avios/Miles/Points they earn.

With that in mind, this is what the cost of the various currencies will look like:

• Alaska Mileage Plan – ~1.08 cents/mile
• American Airlines AAdvantage – ~0.79 cents/mile
• British Airways Executive Club – 0.49 cents/mile
• Delta SkyMiles – ~1.29 cents/mile
• Southwest Rapid Rewards – ~1.14 cents/point
• Chase Ultimate Rewards – ~0.98 cents/point

Note: The United Airlines portal would award 3,200 miles which would see each mile (effectively) costing over 1.5 cents, but as you can generate Chase Ultimate Rewards Points (which convert to United Miles in a 1:1 ratio) for considerably less than that, you would have to be certifiable to think that clicking through the United portal was a sensible thing to do.

Quick thoughts

Personally, I’m probably going to generate 10,000 Avios at just 0.49 cents each because I will probably end up getting around 4x that value out of them and because BA has recently made it a lot harder to earn Avios from flying, but I’m a little tempted by the AAdvantage Miles (I need to top up Joanna’s account) and by the Chase Ultimate Rewards Points (because I like the idea of effectively generating Hyatt points at under a penny each), so I haven’t made my final decision just yet.

The only one of the currencies that I would definitely stay clear of is SkyMiles because (a) it’s is a truly terrible currency and (b) because 1.29 cents is far too much to pay for SkyMiles even if didn’t hate the currency as much as I do 🙂

Key disclaimer

If you read the terms and conditions of the Amex offer carefully, you’ll see that it says that to trigger the credit you need to make a single subscription-based purchase of $99 or more online at fool.com/amex. This would appear to suggest that accessing the Motley Fool site through a shopping portal will not trigger the credit (a portal won’t take you to a site with ‘amex’ in the url).

Historically, however, this has not been the case (I’ve stacked an Amex Motley Fool offer with a shopping portal at least twice before), but you should be aware of this term and understand that your mileage may vary.

Bottom line

Subject to the disclaimer above, it is currently possible to combine a targeted Amex offer and the deals being offered by various shopping portals to generate a variety of miles and points currencies from just 0.49 cents each. The number of miles and points that you can generate at this level isn’t significant, but for anyone needing to top up an account, this could be a very economical way to do so.