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My wife got a super sweet offer on her Barclay Red Aviator card in the mail yesterday

barclay-american-15000-offer

  • Spend $500 in November
  • Spend $500 in December
  • Spend $500 in January

And get 15,000 BONUS MILES.  That’s such a good offer it’s crazy.  Normally these kinds of offers are things like 2x bonus points on certain categories up to 2000 miles, or something like that.  But 16,500 miles is a TON – even just buying $500 gift cards with a $5.95 fee (what I find to be the easiest / laziest way to MS), you’re getting 11x on your spending, and nearly 1000 points per dollar of cost. Since the Barclay Aviator red card is one of the cards that qualifies you for the American reduced mileage awards, for your $1500 in spend (and < $20 in cost), you can get enough for a roundtrip ticket to anywhere in the US and Canada from many airports

(SEE ALSO: The 62 airports where you can fly anywhere in the US for under 8,000 miles)

On posting targeted offers

I do post (some) targeted offers, even though sometimes there isn’t a ton of value in posting all of them.  Obviously it doesn’t do a whole lot of good for most people to read about MY awesome targeted offer, unless you have a way to get in on it :-).

When I post about a targeted offer, I do so in the hopes that some readers might not know about them and might be able to get in on the targeted offer.

A quick Google search indicates that this offer has happened pretty often over the course of a few months

barclay-american-15000-offer-google

My hypothesis was that this was a targeted offer by Barclays to people who got the card but haven’t been putting much spend on the card.  With the annual fee coming up ($95), Barclays wants to give you a reason to bring the card out of the proverbial “sock drawer” and start spending on it, with the hopes that you’ll pay the $95 instead of canceling the card

Testing out the hypothesis

I actually was not sure when the annual fee on my wife’s card was – this was a card that she got as a US Airways 50,000 mile card and was converted to the Aviator card when US Airways and American Airlines combined.

I went back and checked our records, and found that the card anniversary date was 11/25/2014.  Aha!  So in order to take advantage of this offer, I’d have to pay the $89 fee.  Actually, 15,000 bonus miles is probably enough to make it worth it but let’s see if we can find any data points.

I tried to Google for others who reported receiving this offer, and wrote down any information that was posted

So it definitely seems correlated to cards with an annual fee coming up.

I would love to hear any data points from readers – have you ever gotten an offer like this, and if so, when was it in relation to your card’s anniversary date?


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