Redeemed
When I moved to New York in 2003 I opened up a bank account with Citibank. They kind of sucked but what could I do, I had a no fee student account that served me well (until I tried to close it and all hell broke loose, I'll be damned if they were gonna charge me to have my own money!) Anyway, I digress.
When I opened the account I opted for the American Airlines debit card. For a fee of $25 a year I earned one airline mile for every two dollars I spent. In hind sight I should have realized that I was never going to spend enough money to add up to a romantic Parisian vacation but at the time it seemed like a good idea because I knew that I would be flying home for visits and free airline miles to Texas were certainly more practical. Fast forward two years when I am all done with New York and done with the mile rewarding debit card. I never redeemed any of the miles. I was out $50.
Until about a month ago.
I got a letter in the mail from the airline people telling me I had all of these miles just hanging around in my name and although those miles were not worthy of actual flight they were eligible for redemption...in the form of magazine subscriptions. So I went magazine shopping, adding up my unused miles as I went, and received my first issue in the mail today.
In case you were wondering, I subscribed to five different magazines: Bon Appetit, Latina, Lucky, Newsweek and W. I wonder what kind of assumptions the redemptioan person made about me just by looking at my selections...pretty interesting thought.
When I moved to New York in 2003 I opened up a bank account with Citibank. They kind of sucked but what could I do, I had a no fee student account that served me well (until I tried to close it and all hell broke loose, I'll be damned if they were gonna charge me to have my own money!) Anyway, I digress.
When I opened the account I opted for the American Airlines debit card. For a fee of $25 a year I earned one airline mile for every two dollars I spent. In hind sight I should have realized that I was never going to spend enough money to add up to a romantic Parisian vacation but at the time it seemed like a good idea because I knew that I would be flying home for visits and free airline miles to Texas were certainly more practical. Fast forward two years when I am all done with New York and done with the mile rewarding debit card. I never redeemed any of the miles. I was out $50.
Until about a month ago.
I got a letter in the mail from the airline people telling me I had all of these miles just hanging around in my name and although those miles were not worthy of actual flight they were eligible for redemption...in the form of magazine subscriptions. So I went magazine shopping, adding up my unused miles as I went, and received my first issue in the mail today.
In case you were wondering, I subscribed to five different magazines: Bon Appetit, Latina, Lucky, Newsweek and W. I wonder what kind of assumptions the redemptioan person made about me just by looking at my selections...pretty interesting thought.
posted by Ebony @ 8:58 PM
3 Comments:
At 6:36 AM,
Stephanie said…
Hey, so if you COULD have used the airline miles....how much of a trip would it have been worth?
At 10:26 AM,
danielle said…
i often look at the array of magazines i pick up either at the grocery store or the airport while traveling, and it's just as scattered as yours: discovery, wired, people, some fashion mag, and time.
At 12:49 PM,
Ebony said…
Well, you need to have some absurd amount of miles to even begin the redemption process, like 25,000. Now if we do a little simple math we can see that I did not spend anywhere near $50,000 to get that many miles, especially since my net income was about a 5th of that. So yeah, no where near flight redemption, just enough for a few new mags to keep me entertained for the next year or two.
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