Why AAdvantage eShopping Continues to be a Big Part of My Travel Hacking

One of the reasons why I am so passionate about travel hacking is that I am being richly rewarded for making my money work harder for me. Remember that travel hacking is simply the strategies and/or techniques employed to allow one to travel for cheaper, better and/or more often (read more in my intro to travel hacking here).

And many of the miles and points that I earn are via credit cards and sign up bonuses but the other place that has big earning potential is via shopping portals. While I do use Rakuten for cashback/Amex MR points (here’s my primer this shopping portal), I concentrate my spend on the American Airlines (AA) AAdvantage eShopping when possible.

Why AAdvantage eShopping?

Valuable AA Miles

#1 reason for using AA eShopping is that AA miles are covetable due to how valuable they are. They continue to hold that distinction in no small part to being harder to obtain (Econ 101 with scarcity in play here). As there are no transfer partners (ie Amex, Capital One, Chase, Citi etc flexible points cannot be transferred to AA), I use any and all opportunities to earn points via their partners. And how the shopping portal has paid off handsomely for me…

Case in point: how I earned 118,000+ miles via eShopping with one trip. In 2023, I went with my family on an NCL cruise to celebrate a milestone anniversary for my parents. I became the de facto planner for the trip (oh the irony and stress there) but one of the silver linings was the ability to book our excursions on Viator via the AA eShopping portal (for more on Viator, read my how to guide). This is what I mean by maximizing spend: money that will be spent anyway but benefiting from it by getting extra miles in this case…a lot of extra miles!
Note: I took this further by also focusing on return on investment: ie continuing to monitor the multiplier (ie when I first booked, it was 6x$1 for Viator spend but went up to 9x$1 and finally a whopping 12x$1 – which yes meant I rebooked a second and third time but also that I earned twice as many AA miles in the end. For maybe 40 extra minutes of work, I netted 60,000 more AA miles!
Extra bonus and how I saved even more money: not only did we save a tremendous amount of money by not booking through NCL for our excursions, I was able to capitalize on Viator’s own loyalty/reward program. It had just launched when I booked our activities and I earned 10% to use towards future bookings FYI currently you earn 5% Viator Rewards once an activity is completed that can be used towards your next Viator booking.

AA Elite Status

I know I can sound like a broken record but I repeat a few things to help reinforce their importance such as loyalty programs are also a big part of travel hacking. While I don’t advocate chasing elite status just to have it or as a flex, I can speak to how having it definitely made my travels better and cheaper!
The intricacies of the AA’a program are honestly a bit complicated but learning about them helped me strategize and I was able to reach AA Executive Platinum elite status!

Examples of How AAdvantage eShopping Has Paid Of

• I earned over 180,000 AA miles via the shopping portal in the 3/1/23-2/29/24 status qualification year!
  • I was able to use 24,000 AA miles (+ could have been as low as 20K miles) instead of paying $1,100 cash for round trip tickets to Anguilla (and I was upgraded 3 out of four flights: here’s what the MIA-AXA flights were like)
  • I had a comped cruise around Thanksgiving that sailed from Miami and was able to use 10K AA miles instead of paying $328 for a one way flight!
• AA Executive Platinum/ one world Emerald elite status
  • I was able to use one of my system wide upgrades(SWU) at booking to upgrade a $500 basic economy seat to an AA Flagship Business lie flat seat from Europe to US (here’s what that experience was like)
  • On a $129 (£101) economy flight, I was able to use the British Airways First Class wing at London’s Heathrow airport – here’s how I wish flying was always like!

AAdvantage eShopping Basics

TLDR version: You shop with one small difference being that you do it through AAdvantage eShopping. They get paid by the store for your business and then pay you in return for shopping through them.

If you’ve never used a cash-back shopping site or are just curious in general, you may be asking yourself how this works so here you go:

1. Be a member of American Airlines AAdvantage® program, or join for free
2. If you are new to join AAdvantage eShopping® , occasionally there are new member bonuses (currently there’s a referral bonus for spending $75+ through April 6, 2025)
3. Search for a merchant on join AAdvantage eShopping® to see if they offer cashback
4. Click on any of the 1,200 + stores and you’ll be taken to the store’s website.
5. AAdvantage eShopping® will add a ‘tracking cookie’ as you make your purchase on the merchant’s site 
6. Shop like you normally do and pay with any credit card – no special card needed (but always a best practice to see if there’s a SimplyMiles offer and stack your earnings)
7. Once the purchase is processed and the order information is sent to AAdvantage eShopping®, you will typically be notified that your order has tracked.
8. Once order has been reviewed, a confirmation email will be sent when your miles have posted to your shopping account. The miles earned will be added to your AAdvantage® account a day or two later.

Another question you may have what is the cost? There isn’t any as it is free to join and there are no fees to use!

Bonus: AAdvantage eShopping Best Practices

• I will be the first to admit that AAdvantage eShopping can be a pain but if one is diligent, it is possible to capitalize on your spending.
• Remember how shopping portals are paid by merchants for directing traffic to the merchants’ websites so accordingly rely on cookies to prove where your sale came from? This is why it’s vital to have cookies enabled and unfortunately means that certain browsers are not ideal for shopping (Safari is the main one for me).
• I always start with a clean Chrome browser: no other open tabs, no other shopping extensions, and cleared browsing history.
• When booking multiple Viator tours/activities, I will start the process over for each one (ie search AAdvantage eShopping for merchant: Viator and click on Viator then purchase one tour at a time)
• Also screenshot/screen record each step in case you need to submit an inquiry to AA / also keep email receipts for the same reason!