American Airlines Shopping Portal now caps annual earnings from Giftcards.com

In 2022, American Airlines debuted a new simplified system for earning status: Loyalty Points (LP). In addition to earning Loyalty Points by flying, they can also be earned via many other avenues, including by shopping through the American Airlines AAdvantage eShopping portal.

The AA Shopping Portal has been a popular place for folks cruising for both American Airlines status and redeemable miles. Giftcards.com, an online store for both third-party and Visa/Mastercard gift cards, has been the belle of Loyalty Point ball for some people, especially since it often earns 2-3x when clicking through the AA portal (in addition to any credit card rewards). This means that buying $1000 of Visa or Mastercard gift cards would earn 2,000-3,000 LPs in one shot.

The AA shopping portal has long limited earning on Giftcards.com orders to those that are $2,000 or less. Anything above that would (or should) not earn redeemable miles OR Loyalty Points.

Today, reader Whitney noticed a brand new fly in the Giftcards.com ointment: “Rewards are only eligible on the first $20,000 of transactions, calculated continuously over a rolling 365-day period.”

Quick Thoughts

Most readers will take a look at this new restriction and say, “so what?” After all, spending $20K in gift cards in a year seems like a very niche pastime. However, there’s a decent number of folks who pursue AA status who can easily sail pass that amount, either via paying bills, selling gift cards or both.

If that’s you, mind your Ls and Ps from now on, especially since it’s being calculated not by calendar year, but by the previous 365 rolling days…starting from today. If you hit it hard over the last few months before the status year rolled over, it might be a bit before you can safely start up again.

A couple of weeks ago, AA shut down some AAdvantage accounts that had earned copious quantities of LPs through the AA portal and Giftcards.com (GCC). There had been a quirk where LPs (though not redeemable miles) would be awarded even when GCC cancelled an order – which they often do. Some folks found themselves able to repeatedly make orders that would get cancelled, allowing them to rack up LPs at no cost.

Most people who were shut down exploited that glitch, but I know of some others who were caught up in it through normal (though high-volume) GCC portal activity. Now it looks like AA is paying much more attention and doing its best going forward to cap the upside of earning LPs through online giftcards.

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