Citi and American Airlines have made some announcements regarding their co-branded credit cards. Details are as follows:
- New Citi American Airlines MileUp card will be launched on July 22nd.
- No annual fee
- Card will earn at the following rates:
- 2x miles per $1 spent on American Airline purchases and at grocery stores
- 1x mile per $1 spent on all other purchases
- Sign up bonus of 10,000 American Airlines miles and a $50 statement credit after $500 in spend within the first three months
- This card will replace the current Bronze card offered (previously this only earned 1 mile per $2 spent)
- Citi American Airlines Platinum Select personal card:
- Addition of 2x miles per $1 spent at gas stations and restaurants
- $100 American Airlines flight discount after spending $20,0000
- Citi American Airlines Platinum Select business card:
- Addition of 2x per $1 spent at gas stations, certain telecom and cable spending, car rentals
- 25% off American Airlines in flight WiFi
- Annual fee will increase from $95 to $99
Our Verdict
These changes aren’t really significant, addition of 2x categories isn’t that useful as other cards earn at much higher rates on gas & restaurant purchases. Some people had kept their bronze AA cards open to prevent miles from expiring, so I guess it’s better that those earning rates are increasing but those cardholders wouldn’t be doing much spend anyway. Overall the changes are all positive, so we can’t really complain too much it’s just not a lot of value being added.
live
https://www.citicards.com/cards/credit/application/flow.action?app=UNSOL&t=t&sc=4XFA12H8&m=71C2L00101W&B=A&ID=3001&uc=HJH&ProspectID=PgCuEhSaieEFqBcJpv9XGTewm0wdFCPY&intc=7~7~66~1~PDP~1~CMSDefaultOffer~4XFA12H871C2L00101W&pid=410&walletSegment=C184_07&rCode=I000
I just got an email today from Citi AA saying that my AA Bronze will be forced upgraded to the MileUp. That’s a nice change, but AA Bronze sounds like it will be discontinued for the MileUp.
Seems like a great option for downgrading other AA cards.
Citi AA Business (increases annual fee from $95 to $99)
https://information.citi.com/cbaa/intro
Some good news.
I didn’t even know that bronze AA card exists.
There’s also a gold one
https://secure.fly.aa.com/citi/ecm/citi-aadvantage-cardoverview
2x miles per $1 spent on at grocery stores is huge to some folks…the only similar card is Avianca credit card offered by banco popular. after SPG cards turns useless after 8/1, this one is the right one to accumulate AA mileages.
It really is a big deal for many people because a mile is worth about 1.5 cents, so 2 miles is worth 3 cents. That’s a 3% rewards rate for groceries, the same as the Amex BCE.
Will,
I know you posted about this a couple of months ago, but the 10% rebate on the Citi AA Plat is still missing from the new card signup pages and the associated terms page. Any chance this benefit is being quietly removed as of July 22nd?
DoC has posted about it before that only this page https://secure.fly.aa.com/citi/ecm/citi-aadvantage-platinum continues to show the 10% discount. Also, can confirm that I got the discount in the middle of Jun.
Thanks for the response. I referred to that post prior to my question above, so I’m familiar with the link you provided. Bear in mind that Will’s post also contains reference to an AA Twitter response saying that the benefit was being removed, but Will (probably correctly) chose to trust the AA page you linked over the response of a customer service rep.
However, my point is that nothing on the **Citi** website (or in the card terms posted on Citi’s site) includes the benefit, despite the public offer changing since Will’s previous post.
In other words, Citi has had every opportunity to update the terms, but they haven’t. The only page mentioning the benefit being available on the Citi AA Plat is a matrix on **American’s** site, which also includes the Bronze card that is going away. I’m not sure I’d trust a possibly outdated page on a co-brand site over the issuing bank’s publicly posted terms, even if that bank is Citi.
I know Citi’s IT is notoriously poor, but I’m skeptical that they accidentally removed all references to the benefit if they intend to keep it. Therefore, I think it’s worth re-investigating whether it’s going to be continued for **new card applications** after July 22nd, when the changes and new suite of cards will all be in effect.
With all that said, I appreciate the DP that you’ve still received the 10% back recently. To be clear … you don’t also hold the Aviator Red, do you?
You could be right that Citi itself has removed listing the benefit since it is on its way out. This is similar to how the Citi AT&T Access More card was cancelled – they removed links on Citi’s site but a last link remained working from AT&T site which was also eventually removed. So it is possible that this is going away. However, since the 10% back is capped at 10K AA miles, is it that significant when you can get much more thru Citi apps w/o the 24 month language?
And yes, I have the Aviator Red also. Do you think that played a part in the 10% back?
Good point about the 10k cap. It’s not a huge deal in the grand scheme of things, but it’s a nice little bonus that more than covers a one-way reduced mileage award and can be a bigger deal to the more casual folks who aren’t all aboard the grAAvy train like us.
I asked about the Aviator Red because Barclays still publishes the 10% miles rebate for that card on its site. So if you hold both cards, you could be getting the rebate from the Aviator Red instead of the Citi AA Plat.
I think the issue is that it’s actually AA administering the benefit rather than Citi and that’s why it’s not listed on those pages. It’s entirely possible that Citi/AA plans to discontinue this benefit but I haven’t seen anything reliable that suggests this is actually the case.
That makes sense. Just seemed odd to me since Barclays has continued advertising it publicly. I appreciate the reply.
Yeah TBH if the benefit was removed I imagine it would be on the Barclays card as well.
Yeah, that’s what I thought at first, too. But then I wondered if maybe the new category bonuses and the $100 flight discount were specifically intended to replace the 10% rebate benefit.
Depending on Citi’s metrics, I could imagine them looking at the data and seeing that most cardholders redeemed their signup bonus miles, meaning Citi was on the hook for 5,000+ miles in most cases. Maybe they saw an opportunity for higher issuing and redemption breakage by issuing additional miles as category bonuses (whereby they’d partially offset the miles with increased terminal fees and would require users to spend $2,500+ in order to get the same number of bonus miles) and offering a flight discount that requires particularly high spend.
Of course, that’s all based on the idea that Citi is actually paying American a nominal fee for the rebate miles instead of American just treating it as a discounted award, which could very well be a faulty assumption on my part.
I got the miles back within minutes of an award reservation yesterday
I think it may also have to do with the fact that it’s ENABLED BY (rather than offered by) cards from two competing banks. Citi may simply not want to document that it doesn’t stack with Barclay (ie, that’s the same 10% back and 10k cap whether you hold only a qualifying Citi card or only a qualifying Barclay card or both) as that would make them have to mention a competitor bank, and thus Citi may have felt that it was simpler to remove its own documentation and rely on AA’s documentation.
makes sense, I like it!
I would say this is to compete with the Delta Blue Amex 2x on Delta and Dining 1x everywhere else, no annual fee.