The miles you earn will be added to your AAdvantage account and can be redeemed for award travel. While you can redeem miles for other items, award travel represents the best value. For example, I redeemed 140,000 miles to fly my wife and I to Maldives in Qatar Airways business class (Qatar Airways is an airline partner of American Airlines and allows you to redeem AAdvantage miles with them). It was a tremendous value, as the tickets would have cost $8,500 if I had paid in cash.