One of the best current credit card sign-up offers is to get 100,000 American Airlines miles after spending $10,000 in 3 months. This is courtesy of the Citi® Executive® / AAdvantage® WorldElite™ MasterCard®, which will soon be the only credit card that includes access to American Airlines and US Airways airport lounges. (Update: The 100K offer is no longer available.)
As a lounge membership credit card, the annual fee is particularly high at $450. But it’s still comparable to the price of buying a membership separately and comes with a host of other elite benefits that I’ve already discussed. Among these is a $200 statement credit for a limited time, which brings down the net cost of your first year to $250. Amol verified that the statement credit appears not to require any spending on American Airlines. Just spend $200 anywhere in the first 12 months and get $200 back!
That’s like getting 100,000 miles for $250 even if you don’t use the lounge membership. You’ll also get at least 10,000 miles in the process of completing the minimum spend requirement. The total of 110,000 miles is enough for a round-trip business class award ticket from the continental U.S. to everywhere American Airlines flies.
I speculated a few weeks ago that this offer would only be around through March 15. That day has now passed and yet I can still access the offer page — you can find it on my list of the best travel credit card offers. But I’m happy to be wrong. My goal at the time was only to reassure myself that it would still be around as late as mid-March if some of us wanted to wait to apply. I don’t have any good ideas about setting a new deadline, but if forced to guess I would say sometime around March 22, when the Admirals Club and US Airways Club finally close their doors to Amex Platinum Cardholders.
Finally, PointChaser recently described how she was able to get two of these cards. I always double up by getting the same cards for Megan and I, but this would allow us to get four cards total — nearly a half million miles for just $1,000. We won’t be doing that since we rarely do that level of manufactured spend and can’t fathom reaching $40,000 in three months, but it could be a worthwhile opportunity for some of you.
