Redeem your AAdvantage Miles for hotels and car rentals

Soaring Above the Cloud Beds by Xynn Tii on Flickr

American just announced that you’ll now be able to redeem AAdvantage Miles or combine miles and cash for hotels and car rentals. They’re also offering reduced milage awards to AAdvantage elite members. Here’s the highlight of their press release:

The American Airlines AAdvantage® program today introduced a new way for customers to use their miles for non-air award redemptions. Members booking travel can choose to pay for car rentals and hotel stays using only miles or a combination of cash plus as few as 1,000 AAdvantage miles.

AAdvantage members can benefit from some of the market’s most competitive rates for redeeming miles for car rentals and hotel stays at more than 10,000 locations in more than 320 destinations worldwide. Additionally, AAdvantage elite status members will have access to exclusive redemption rates based on their AAdvantage Executive Platinum®, AAdvantage Platinum® or AAdvantage Gold® status when booking car and hotel award products. To learn about all of these enhancements, please visit www.aa.com/carandhotelawards.

“This new offering is a way for us to give our members more options and more flexibility with their miles. The redemption rates for our elite members give our most frequent flyers even greater value when redeeming miles,” said Maya Leibman, President – AAdvantage Loyalty Program. “These new redemption features give our customers another great reason to earn AAdvantage miles by flying on American, using a Citi® / AAdvantage® credit card or through hundreds of other partners.”

Just to get an idea as to how many miles it takes to book a room, I went to the UseAAMiles site and searched for a room in New York City for a long weekend: January 14 – 17, 2011. For my example, I chose the New York Hilton that’s located in the theatre district. Hilton is quoting an online price of $199 per night. AAdvantage members can book the same hotel for 60,900 miles (20,300 miles per night). I logged into the site using my AAdvantage number and my Platinum status dropped the number of miles needed to 50,800 (16,934 per night).

Obviously, I think AAdvantage is already a great program, now it just got even better. Read more about it here.