The Offer
- Earn 20X miles on your purchases at Williams-Sonoma (maximum of 10,000 miles) when you use a Barclaycard American Airlines Aviator card that has been targeted for this offer via e-mail during the promotional period.
The Fine Print
- Maximum of 10,000 miles can be earned
- No registration required
- Take advantage of this exclusive cardmember offer online, in-store, or on catalog purchases today
- From 8/11/15 through 9/7/15
- Offer cannot be transferred
- Bonus miles will not be awarded for shipping, taxes and delivery surcharges
Maximizing The Deal
You could obviously purchase items you need/want at Williams-Sonoma (they are having a 20% off sale) or you could resell merchandise from there. That sounds like entirely too much work to me, so let’s go to our old faithful gift card route.
- Gift cards can be resold for 84% of face value (means you’re basically paying 0.8¢ per point)
This is a pretty good value, but we can always do better. Frequent Miler’s lab says that somebody had success using the American Airlines shopping portal to purchase a physical gift card. That shopping portal is currently paying 2x miles, meaning we’d earn an additional 1,000 miles and bringing our cost per mile down to 0.731¢. Fantastic, but we can still do better right? American Airlines is also offering a shopping portal bonus, spending $500 would net you another 1,250 miles.
In the end you’d be paying $80 for 12,250 American Airline miles or 0.653¢ per mile. There are also other portals offering miles and points as well, no idea if any of those will work on a gift card though.
Our Verdict
If you’re one of those people that claims they always get 2¢+ per mile in value, then jump on this deal. Personally I’m far to lazy to spend this much time on a deal which results in me purchasing miles on the cheap, especially when I’ve already maxed the shopping portal bonus. There is also considerable risk in this deal, the portal miles might not post and gift cards can and probably will drop (SaveYa being the only one that is offering 84%).
I really just wrote this post because so many of you e-mailed me asking how to make this deal work. If anybody works out anything better, let me know in the comments.
