20% Off and 17 Points / Miles Per Dollar At Bloomingdale's With Chase Freedom And AA Shopping Portal

Update: Some offers mentioned below are no longer available. View the current offers here.

The holidays might still be a ways off, but if you're looking to get a head start on your gift list - or you just want to update your fall wardrobe - there's a pretty great promotion going on through American Airlines' AAdvantage eShopping portal right now at Bloomingdale's.

Now through October 5 (Saturday) instead of earning 4X American miles per $1 when you shop through the airline's online portal, you can earn 12X points per $1 instead. Bloomingdale's is also offering a Friends and Family sale of 20% off fashion and home items, and take 10% off electrics and electronics at Bloomingdales.com. To get this special offer from Bloomingdale's, you must enter the offer code FANDF during checkout.

To combine the two, be sure to finish your shopping by Saturday so you earn the extra miles and get the discount, but throw in one more step and you can earn even more points on top of that.

That's because one of the Chase Freedom's 5X bonus spending categories for Q4 (up to the usual cap of $1,500 per quarter) is department stores, which includes Bloomingdale's. That means if you click through the American portal and use your Freedom card to pay for the purchase, you'll earn 5 X Chase Ultimate Rewards points per $1 on top of the American miles and the Friends and Family discount. With just the Freedom card, those points are good towards cash back at a rate of 1 cent per point, but if you have one of the premium Ultimate Rewards cards - the Sapphire Preferred, Ink Bold or Ink Plus - they become much more valuable since you can transfer them to any of the program's 10 transfer partners including United, British Airways, Southwest, Korean Air, Virgin Atlantic, Hyatt, Marriott, Ritz-Carlton, Priority Club and Amtrak. Check out this post for how to maximize the Freedom/Sapphire Preferred/Ink combination’s points-earning potential and just be sure you have activated your Chase Freedom for the category bonuses.

So if you were to shop this way, you'd earn 12 American miles, which I value at about 1.9 cents each, and 5 Ultimate Rewards points, which I value at 2 cents apiece, per dollar. That's like getting almost 33% back on your spending - and that's not even taking the 20% discount into account!

The other card with which this could potentially be a lucrative shopping spree excuse is the Discover it. Like the Freedom, the card offers 5% cash back at quarterly rotating merchants up to a quarterly cap of $1,500 in purchases. But this quarter (October 1 - December 31), the card's 5% bonus is on all online shopping (just beware it does not apply to government products or services, education providers, utilities, or travel). Unlike the Freedom, which will retroactively credit you with bonus points even if you activate after you shop (up to December 14), you must register your Discover card for the bonus before you shop.

So you could use your Discover it card for the purchases instead if you don't have the Freedom or prefer the cash back on this card and to use your Ultimate Rewards points for travel transfers. Either way, be sure your card is registered for the quarterly category spending bonuses and that you shop through American's online portal to get the full bonus.