Tag Archives for barclays.
The Barclays-issued AAdvantage cards are officially converting to Citi on April 24, and Citi just published the full playbook — including new cards with new account numbers and a no-login window April 24–26.
The sleeper detail is that for now your existing card’s legacy perks stay in place while you also pick up the standard Citi-version benefits, creating a temporary stacking window (especially valuable for Aviator Silver moving to Globe).
I’ve had the Aviator Red card before, and I have the Aviator Silver (converted from an Aviator Red). I also recently cancelled my Barclays Hawaiian Airlines cards. Barclays can be finicky so honestly I wasn’t expecting to be approved.
Currently, two banks issue American Airlines credit cards in the U.S.: Citibank and Barclays. The airline’s new cobrand deal grants exclusivity for this business to Citibank starting next year. And Barclays cards are going to move over to Citi.
While JetBlue is in severe cost-cutting mode, eliminating cities and routes, dropping hot meals from long haul economy, and scaling back its fleet ambitions, they’re planning to add business class lounges – having gotten Barclays to pay for it.
The new premium JetBlue credit card makes the economics of lounges work for them, and the details were allowed to leak out online.
American Airlines and Citibank have entered into an agreement to extend their cobrand credit card agreement by 10 years. This deal pushes out Barclays, and makes Citi the sole issuer of American Airlines credit cards in the U.S. starting in 2026.
We will start to see points transfers from Citibank to American AAdvantage and likely more.
Barclays just isn’t big enough to bid effectively for the whole American AAdvantage card portfolio. Citibank had the chance to take the whole thing, and also to offer points transfers to AAdvantage as part of its ThankYou-brand card product suite. But they balked at the price. Ultimately American got the biggest deal possible by leaving two card issuers in place. That could change.
I have nearly 10 million AAdvantage miles and I’m still tempted to re-consider having this card again in my wallet. As many readers know, base points from spend (so not the initial bonus, and not the additional points from spending in a bonus category) count towards AAdvantage elite status now.
During the pandemic credit card companies weren’t adding many new customers for travel credit cards. But customers were still cancelling cards, at least at normal rates. (Banks went to great lengths to retain customers and did stop greater levels of cancellations in most cases.)
But without adding customers to the funnel, portfolios shrank. That’s a major reason we’ve seen such big initial bonuses over the past 6-9 months. And we’ve also been seeing cards get refreshed with new benefits, to remain competitive, to better appeal to new customers, and to address customer preferences that have changed.
The Citibank and Barclays premium consumer cards get a year’s grace period on their spend threshold bonuses for elite status under the new Loyalty Points system of qualifying for AAdvantage elite. The Barclays business card, however, does not.
And, it seems, Barclays wasn’t just able to remove this benefit from its applications and instead has taken the applications down – they can’t promise something to cardmembers they aren’t going to deliver.
The new American Airlines elite status-earning program that goes into effect next year is going to make some flyers very happy. Anyone who can spend a lot on credit cards is going to find status-earning much easier. In fact, you can earn Executive Platinum status with $200,000 in spend alone.
It turns out that in addition to having a longer period in which to do credit card spend, you don’t even need to spend as much next year.
Gary Leff is one of the foremost experts in the field of miles, points, and frequent business travel -- a topic he has covered since 2002.
Co-founder of frequent flyer community InsideFlyer.com, emcee of the Freddie Awards, and named one of the "World's Top Travel Experts" by Conde' Nast Traveler (2010-Present) Gary has been a guest on most major news media, profiled in several top print publications, and published broadly on the topic of consumer loyalty. More About Gary »
