Last year I decided to get the Barclays Miles & More Lufthansa card when it was offering a sign up bonus of 50,000 miles.
Considering that I fly with Kim and Lucas on pretty much all of our trips, the 50K bonus wasn’t going to get us far. I kind of thought it wasn’t the best move to get the card in the end, but I’m sure that the miles will go to use for (most likely) a couple of domestic flights.
When the fee came up for the card late last week, I knew that it was going to get closed. However, before doing so I figured that it couldn’t hurt to see if they might have a retention offer for me.
When I called in to Barclays, I immediately explained that I was interested in closing my card. The friendly phone rep asked me why I wanted to do so. After I told her about not wanting to pay the $79 annual fee, I was placed on a brief hold and transferred to a specialist.
After again explaining the situation, I was given two options besides closing my account.
- Barclays offered to waive 50% of the annual fee
- I could transfer to a fee-free Barclays Arrival card
When the rep offered to waive 50% of the fee, I assumed she would come back and offer to just get rid of the whole fee when I turned the offer down. However her only other offer was to switch to the Arrival card.
The Arrival card would give me a bonus of 10,000 point if I spent $1,000 in the first month. She also mentioned that no credit report would be pulled.
I decided pretty fast to turn down the option to switch cards. If I’m going to get an Arrival card, then I want to get the full sign up bonus of 40,000 points!
After declining both offers one last time, the rep went ahead and closed my account.
Now I need to figure out what to do with my meager amount of Lufthansa miles.
Have any of you called in for a retention offer for your Lufthansa Miles & More card? If so, I’d love to hear if Barclays offered you something better than what I received.
Hopefully you had another Barclays card already opened that you transferred your CL to before you closed the LH card?
Levy Flight- Enjoy the first class flight when the time comes! For me, since I need 3 tickets that won’t be happening although it would’ve been nice to fly LH first one time.
Ryan- Sounds like you got a very nice offer. I would’ve gladly accepted it too!
Howtofreetravel- Probably wouldn’t have been a bad idea but I’ve already closed it. With a bunch of new recent approvals, it didn’t bother me much to close this one out.
Call back again until they offer you the waiver
Just went through the same process over the past weekend. No spend on it other than the minimum spend for the bonus a year ago. Rep waived the full annual fee, offered me 5000 bonus points for $1000 spend within 90 days, and offered me a $4000 credit line increase without a credit pull. I was completely shocked but accepted all three offers.
On the surface the LH card looks good but the fuel charges are very restrictive if want to use on a flight to EU from US. I’ve got about 70k miles on them and adding a few more by partner options like hertz. Can top up with SPG points. still trying to work out what to do with them before they expire. i’d rsther use for a first class flight than fritter on US internal.