I’m not sure if this has been written about elsewhere, so thought I’d throw it out there. I received via e-mail and snail mail an offer essentially offering 15,000 bonus miles for spending $500 in each October, November, and December.
Example spend to get the bonus.
The interesting part to me though is the terms and conditions:
Offer is valid for select cardmembers and is not transferable. You will earn 15,000 bonus miles after you charge $500 or more in net retail purchases (purchases that are not returned or rescinded) each calendar month from October 1, 2015 through December 31, 2015. If you do not spend over $500 in any of the 3 months of the promotion you will not be eligible for any bonus miles as part of this offer. To receive your bonus miles, your account must be open, active and in good standing. Purchases made during periods when your account is delinquent or your account is otherwise not in good standing as defined in your Credit Card Cardmember Agreement do not qualify for this offer. Your bonus miles will appear on your statement up to 6-8 weeks after the end of the promotion. Net retail purchases do not include such things as the purchase of money orders, traveler’s checks, foreign currency, lottery tickets, gambling chips, wire transfers, person-to-person money transfers or using the account to obtain a cash advance.
So, despite the chart showing that you could earn the bonus from spending $500 even each month, in reality, you need to get over $500 (see bold above).
Also note that it is for select cardmembers. I’ve gotten this for both of my cards (one via e-mail and one via snail mail), however my wife didn’t receive any offer for her card. It is not uncommon to get these offers after you have sock drawered your cards, so if you don’t receive it for the upcoming quarter, consider sock drawering your card until you do (if you really want the promotion).
Conclusion:
Barclays is pretty consistent with offering bonuses like these. From my perspective, spending a little over $500 per card per month for three months to get 15,000 AA miles each is a no brainer. I hope many others received this targeted offer.
Did you receive this or a similar offer for your Barclays AAdvantage Aviator card?
fwiw I called and they couldn’t match me to the promotion
@Paul – I’m sorry to hear that! Perhaps try sock drawering your card for a couple months?
Got an email about this last week, days before the annual fee comes due. I was going to downgrade to a fee-free Aviator. So, 16,500 AA miles for $89 to use for another year a credit card I’ve spent less than $1,000 on in the first year, which would be okay except the last 18 months I’ve added four Barclay cards to the sock drawer @ 50-60,000 AA miles per $89 fee. So I’m spoiled, but may go for it anyway, although Barclay generally offers considerably more friction to its customers than do Chase-Citi-AmEx. Barclay CSRs were uniformly outraged, for example, when I asked for payment due date changes at account opening to synch all my cards. A 5,000 mile extra sign-up bonus they laid on me for one card took five statement cycles to finally credit to the account. Even the free FICO score is only updated four or five times a year. But I’ll probably renew, turn my head, and think of England.
It seems to me like with the Barclay Aviator card, it can’t hurt to generate an additional 16.5k miles. You may still yet be able to get a retention bonus, although I haven’t tried myself.