If you have an annual fee that is due (or has already posted to your account) you should always call the retention department to see if they will offer you anything to keep the card. In fact, it’s worth calling a lot more often as retention bonuses aren’t always tied to when the annual fee is due.
[Must Read: Retention Bonus Rules & Tips For Each Card Issuer – Get More Than One Bonus Each Year]
Barclaycard seems like they are getting increasingly desperate to sign up and keep as many US Airways cardholders as they can before the merger. They’ve offered some nice bonuses recently: $25 for opting for paperless statements, 50% bonus on all points earned (still valid) and people have received all sorts of targeted spending bonuses as well.
Today I read an interesting post by u/evarga on reddit.com/r/churning about a retention bonus s/he received.
So I called to cancel my Barclays US Air card because the fee would be posting in a week or so. Without asking I was offered
- a fee waiver with no conditions
- an offer for 10K miles for spending $3K in 90 days
- the 50% bonus on miles from spend until June
In addition, I already had:
- a mail offer for 15K for $500 spending in Feb/Mar/Apr.
- 10K annual miles, which have posted already.
Other people also had success in the comments. I’ve got a friend that also has the US Airways card and his annual fee had already posted to the account. I got him to call up and he received the following offer:
- Annual fee waived
- Spend $3,000 within 90 days and receive 10,000 bonus miles
- 0% APR for balance transfers
This means that if he spends $3,000 on the card he’ll receive a total of 14,500 points which is an earn rate of nearly 5x miles per dollar spent. It’s always a good idea to call retention, you never know what bonus they will rattle off and competition for retaining customers is increasing rapidly. We’ve seen some great offers recently from Citi as well.
It’ll be interesting to see how keen Barclaycard is to keep US Airways cardholders when they transition to the new American Airlines Aviator cards. One can only hope that these bonuses will continue to flow.
