MagsforMiles One Step Away!

MAGAZINES FOR AIRLINE MILES INFORMATION

[post updated on May 2009]

Information on airlines provided in alphabetical order by airline name. American, Continental, Delta, Hawaiian, Northwest, United and US Airways are covered in this post.
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AMERICAN AIRLINES----------Follow this Link

BRITISH AIRWAYS (no direct link) try POINTS.COM

CONTINENTAL AIRLINES---- Follow this Link

DELTA AIRLINES-------------- Follow this link

FRONTIER AIRLINES---------- Follow this link

HAWAIIAN AIRLINES----------Follow this link

MIDWEST AIRLINES------ Follow this link (Alternate Link)
(they also have Mileage exchange, a useful program for converting to Hilton Or use points.com to swap)

NORTHWEST AIRLINES------ Follow this link

UNITED AIRLINES------------- Follow this link
(zip code needed)

US AIRWAYS------------------- Follow this link
Magazines only with US Airways miles, for newspapers you have to use Points.com
through the link Subscriptions for miles

POINTS.COM-------------------- Follow this Link
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Additional notes, reviews, comments etc.

AMERICAN [Link]
In my opinion, The Wall Street Journal - 230 and Conde Nast are good deals. I have used this twice successfully.

BRITISH AIRWAYS (no direct link) try POINTS.COM


CONTINENTAL [Link]
Has magazines as well as some kind of discount deal (50% off) on other merchandise. About the 50% deals [Miles for Merchandise], compare prices before buying. I am not reviewing Onepass as I have earned Onepass miles.

DELTA ([Link]
Comparable to the deal you get with AA miles.

FRONTIER [Link]
Not reviewed

HAWAIIAN [Link]
I have not used Hawaiian so I am not reviewing it here.

NORTHWEST [Link]
Same deal as AA or Delta miles (Note: NW is going to merge with Delta soon but websites remain separate)

UNITED AIRLINES [Link] (zip code needed)
I have not used this service as I use my UA miles for travel rewards usually.

US AIRWAYS [Link]
(please turn off your pop up blocker on the US Airways website)
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MAGAZINES AT POINTS.COM website
Points.com is an online portal that lets you convert airline miles and hotel reward points to useful items or swap them into other programs. You can also get Amazon certificates at points.com using your airline miles. This is yet another way to get magazines for airline miles. For miles of these carrriers: Hawaiian, American, US Airways you can get magazines via the POINTS.COM website. The downside of using a service like points.com is that the conversion losses are considered steep by some people.

But still, you have some additional flexibility to convert miles or points with which you cannot fly, but want some value out of (it). At points.com you can also convert those miles to amazon.com cash. You would need certain minimum miles depending on the program to get anything useful on points.com. So make sure you have a few thousand miles at least.

Points.com may give you more flexibility in spending the final amount. The approximate conversion rate to amazon.com gift certificate value* is discussed here. Currently (Jan 09) it is free to sign up with points.com.

My experience at Points.com: I converted some 13,000 US airways miles (near expiry) from my mom's Dividend miles account to Amazon gift certificates (~$11?). At points.com, you can convert miles at rates ranging from 0.8 cent/mile to as low as 0.4 cent/mile , which is way lower than my cost basis of 1c/mile).

If you want any other Airlines to be covered or have info on other airlines, please leave me a comment and I will add that to this list. Thank you! A similar post on this topic is here.
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Looking for cheap paid subscriptions to magazines?
You can visit the following Amazon.com link Magazine Subscriptions From Amazon
Maybe people are trying to use up their accumulated miles for something, rather than letting them go waste. Considering how hard it has become to redeem miles for award tickets nowadays, converting them to magazines or Amazon cash (more on that in another page) is very welcome.
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TYPICAL MAGAZINES

Barrons, Conde Nast Traveler, Fast Company, New York Magazine, Wine Spectator and several others are great choices for leisure or useful (read as "forming money making ideas") reading.

Looking for paid magazine subscriptions?
Support this site by getting your Magazine Subscriptions From Amazon

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ORIGINAL POST ON HOW I WAS WARNING PEOPLE TO BE CAREFUL ABOUT MAGSFORMILES WEBSITE
with updates in blue

Watch out for bad ugly sites out there. Especially if you want magazines for your miles (airline miles). I have a feeling that most of these Magazines for miles websites could just be phishing operations.

The classic case is MagsforMiles [http://www.magsformiles.com/], a site that makes you fill out information such as FF no, name and address, makes you select the magazines and then when you click Submit selection, it gives a response that the site is just a demo, but thanks for the info anyway.

Hmm! Thankfully I used my one account with only 1000 miles but I am still concerned about giving my name and address away. Shucks.

UPDATE: I realized that my paranoia was a little unfounded. [I got my mags and nothing untoward happened back then] I had posted the above material long back, but recently found out that this page has been getting lot of views. [My random post seems to be of some to people on this planet so I have rewritten my initial post to make it more informational.]

Converting Airlines Miles to Amazon Certificates

This post explains some conversions of airline miles (AAdvantage, US Airways etc), on the miles swap website points.com (details true as of Aug 19, 2008 when logged in from US for my account). If you are completely new to Points.com, make sure you use the "Start Here" link in the green menu bar at the top of the points.com site.

For info on magazines for miles go back in time.


Your actual conversions might be different. Briefly, it seemed to me that AA miles convert better than US Airways for getting Amazon cash.

Points.com does give you flexibility in terms of coverage from Aeroplan, US Airways or America West miles, Frontier, Delta, American Airlines, Amex Membership pts, IcelandAir, Midwest, Hawaiian and a few others.


As you can see in the image above (click for larger size) you can convert points on points.com to a variety of gift certificates with Avis or Macy's or Amazon or Gap, TJMaxx etc.. Each have their own conditions and restrictions but it might be worth converting free miles that you got somewhere.

But when it comes to converting any of these to something that you want, be prepared to lose 50, to even 70-80% of the value at times. But hey, if you earned all the miles through credit cards or paid business travel, why not just spend them and stop worrying about expiry.

One way to convert obscure miles in random amounts (like 6000, 11345 etc) to something useful is the Amazon Gift Certificate option. You seem to get a good deal from AA, No deal from Delta and a stingy deal from US airways miles. I did not review other programs as I don't have any miles in them.

For example let us try to swap a hypothetical 30000 miles Swap 29,882 AAdvantage® program miles for a $127 Amazon.com gift certificate,

In contrast, check how much devalued US Airways Dividend Miles are: swap 29,412 Dividend Miles® miles for a $25 Amazon.com gift certificate

This is on top of the fact that, when you get any Dividend Miles Credit Card** you have to pay the Annual fee ($85) from the first year itself. (the post diverges here to talk about credit cards)

In my opinion, the Dividend miles card is NOT WORTH IT Go for some cash back cards instead if you really need a rewards credit card. However I did end up using some 15,294 Dividend miles for a $13 Amazon cert. Hey otherwise those miles were going to expire and go waste.

The only other option I had was to donate it to Make a Wish Foundation, but I had already done that to 5000 American miles before so I didnt want to do it again so soon.

Note that the 30,000 miles on AA can get almost free ticket to Latin America or Puerto Rico from US. (off peak of course).

25000 on US Airways may get you a free ticket or maybe not. Depends on the route and your luck and the temperature in Wisconsin (I made that up, but there is no way to figure out Airline FF awards, haha).

** Link to Dividend miles card information: Card Info