Turning Down A Citi AA Retention Offer

a close up of a credit card

The time has come for the annual fee on my Citi American Airlines Mastercard and I wasn’t about to pay $95 to hold onto the card for another year.

I decided to call in to see if there were any interesting offers available for me before going ahead to close my card. In some ways I hoped there wasn’t. I’d like to thin out my stack of open cards before opening  many more…

I called in and spoke to a friendly Citi rep and mentioned my concerns about paying the annual fee. I asked about being transferred to a retention specialist and within a couple of minutes I was finding out what they could do for me.

I again went over why I wanted to close my card and was then told that there was an offer available to me.

The rep told me that my account qualified for a $95 statement credit. Along with the credit I could earn 1,000 bonus miles per month when spending $1,000+ for up to 16 billing cycles.

Since I called in with concerns about the annual fee, the Citi rep probably thought I’d definitely keep my account open. Considering the issue I initially mentioned was solved why would I close!

Getting the card for another year, fee free sounds appealing but this isn’t a card that I’ve used much since earning my signup bonus. The 1,000 point per month bonus is also of little interest to me. I have a ton of AAdvantage miles (not that you could ever have too many!) so I am not focused on earning more at the moment.  When I’m not working towards minimum spends on new cards, I’m trying to build up my Starwood account.

What do you think of this retention offer? Would you have kept the card open or closed it?

8 thoughts on “Turning Down A Citi AA Retention Offer

  1. I was offered and accepted the same deal recently. It works out well for me as I do expect to use the 10% AA award rebate, and I will use the 1000 mile bonuses occasionally, especially between churns.

    IMO, there’s something to be said for keeping cards more than a year when you get a deal like this. It’s better for the relationship with the bank.

  2. Got the same offer when I renewed last June. I took the offer given it was waving AF and 1k bonus miles with 1k spend. (essentially earning 2x). This AA card is pretty much used for loading Serve 🙂 and since JFK is my goto airport… I primarily fly AA so the cc benefits of priority boarding and free checked is very useful for the 4 times i fly a year!! And that 10% rebate on awards is great to have too!!!!

  3. Joey- I currently have 3 Citi Exec cards as well as a couple of others. I’ve never moved or heard of moving credit with Citi. Do you do this?

    Grant- Not a bad strategy but I haven’t seen many Citi spend offers exciting enough to keep a card open for.

    1. I personally did not since I kept my citi AA mastercard open with the same offer you got (at the time that was my only AA credit card & it was before the big 100k exec bonuses were offered.)

  4. Just thinking more about it, did you at least move the credit that you had with the aadvantage card to another credit card you have with Citi?

  5. I keep every card open the reimburses the annual fee. Citi often sends out targeted offers for spending challenges, which could be worth it. If nothing else, it gives you another year to think about it and use the card as leverage for future Citi card offers.

  6. I think it depends. I would have kept it if I didn’t have any other Citi AA cards.

    If you have multiple Citi AA exec cards already open, then that’s another story.

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