American Airlines has sent out a pretty nice promotion for customers who are planning on renting a car – up to 7,500 AAdvantage miles when you rent a car from Avis. Rental car companies often give miles or points in your preferred airline or hotel program when renting a car, but this is certainly one of the best offers that have been around.
Earn 7,500 AAdvantage Miles With Avis
The promotion for rentals runs through July 15th. It is a tiered promotion, so you get a set amount of miles based on the amount of days you rent for. It breaks down like this:
The real great point is 7+ days
From a price and award standpoint, it really starts to get good for rentals past 5 days. A rental contract “week” normally starts at the 5 day mark and weekly contracts are (mostly) much better than a daily rate. Plus, if you keep a car for a minimum of 7 days, you will get the full 7,500 miles!
How To Get It
To get this promo, all you need to do is to click on this link. It will already have the rate code and coupon code in the correct boxes so you just need to fill in the rest of the information – including your AA number! The AWD number (or rate code) is K817187 and the coupon code is MUAA036.
Is It Worth It?
Many times, the rate codes necessary to take advantage of a bonus mile deal do not really give you the best of rates. However, I searched using my personal rate code, without a rate code, and this offer’s rate code and the AA offer rate is the same as my personal rate. In other words, using their rate code is actually giving you a better deal than if you were to rent directly from Avis without using a rate code.
I searched a few different dates and found some pretty great rental deals. One of the best was a rate of of $122 (before tax) for a subcompact for a week. If you value AA miles at around 1.5 cents per mile, that would put your effective rate for the rental car at $7 (before tax) when you figure in the value of the miles. That is not bad at all! This could even be a price point that might make you rent a car so you can get some extra miles! 🙂
The only bad thing about using this rate is that it is not eligible for the prepaid discount. If you like to prepay your rentals, you can chop off another part of the cost (in the above case, an extra $13). For me, my plans often change and I do not like to be locked into a car rental so it does not bother me.
This is the rate offering when using my rate code
This is the price when using the AAdvantage rate code – same as above
This is the price when using no rate code – quite a bit higher!
So, if you have a rental coming up before July 15th, I would definitely go with this offer. If you do not have a rental coming up but have some good rates near you, it may even be worth it to sign up anyway. You will get a rental car to use for a low cost and get some pretty great AAdvantage miles.
Have fun with it!
MUAA004 is also valid until August 31 for all of the above rates except the 7 day bonus. You usually do not need to use the AWD listed above, I use my corporate one and still get all of the bonus miles with the 04 coupon code.
Dumb question, but I can’t figure it out from the T&Cs. Can you get the bonus miles multiple times? It doesn’t say once per type but I would imagine there is some kind of cap. It does say “up to 7500 miles” but does that mean I can do three rentals of 3 days and get 7500 (3000 x 3, up to cap)?
It’s up to 7500 miles per rental. So, if you have 3 separate trips of 3 days, you should get 9,000 bonus miles.
Surely there must be some kind of cap though? I have about 55 days of rentals between now and August 31; does that really mean I can earn around 50k miles?
Correction: 165k if I am doing three day rentals on average??
You are right – it is not clearly stated that you only get it once, so I would take a screenshot of their T&C and check with them after the second rental if the points have not posted. You can cancel rentals at any time, so if they give you a hard time, I would point to all of your upcoming rentals (if you are booking them with Avis because of this promotion).
I used this promo in June. Now I have another trip coming up in a week. Will I still be eligible the 2nd time?