Update: This is now a permanent program, more details here.
Barclaycard has launched a new program for American Airline cardholders called ‘Flight Cents’. Flight Cents is a round up program that works like this, when you make a purchase they will round up your purchase to the nearest dollar and then use those cents to purchase miles at a rate of 1¢ per mile (note: some people are being offered a worse version where they only multiply it by 50% meaning you’d be paying 2¢ per mile). For example let’s say you make a purchase for $9.90, Barclaycard will round that up to $10 (and charge you that amount) and then 10 American Airline miles will be purchased for $0.10. Similarly if your purchase is $0.50 it will be rounded up to $1 and 50 miles would be purchased for $0.50. You can also set limits on how many miles you’d like to purchase per month as well.
At the moment this is just a pilot program and you must be invited to participate (e-mail subject line is “Spare change? Put it towards your next trip. Enroll today.”). You must enroll by September 30th, 2017 and the program will run from October 1st until March 31st, 2018. The problem with the current Barclaycard American Airline cards is that they earn 1x miles on all purchases, this means most people won’t want to use them for every day purchases when they could be earning 2-3% cash back. You could still use this to generate miles at a maximum of 2¢ per point by purchasing $0.50 Amazon gift cards (you’d also be getting the gift cards) or by even less by using other methods to generate lots of small transactions.
How useful this offer is will really depend on how much you value American Airline miles and what sort of transactions you usually make. Keep in mind that the Barclaycard Aviator Red currently has a 60,000 mile bonus (one of the best current credit card bonuses) but it’s unlikely you’d be offered this new flight cents program.
Hat tip to all the readers who sent me this when I was on vacation, sorry there are too many to individually name.
