Reapplying for the Citi AAdvantage Platinum Card: Better than the Two Browser Trick?

The best public offer for the Citi Platinum Select AAdvantage Visa Signature card (that’s a mouthful) is 30K  (or sometimes 40K) miles after $1K spend in 3 months. This is a very weak deal, and under normal circumstances you should not waste a credit inquiry applying for this offer. On FlyerTalk, however, there is an entire thread dedicated to some non-standard offers on the Citi AA cards that has a better offer for this card.

During my last application cycle in April, I applied for the Platinum AAdvantage Visa using a link on FlyerTalk and was instantly approved for the card. The application page didn’t indicate the 50K miles, but I confirmed the bonus during my call to activate the card and the miles promptly posted to my AA account. The link I used back then became unavailable, but has been replaced with a new 50K offer after $3K spend in 3 months with the first year’s annual fee waived.

The reason this offer is special is because you can actually apply for this card without canceling the one you already have. Just read through the FlyerTalk thread — you’ll find plenty of people that have applied for the card and received the bonus twice…and some have even been approved three times (including a reader who mentioned this to me).

I wanted to get in on the fun too, so I applied for a second time during my newest set of applications last week. I wasn’t approved instantly, but Citi has this cool feature where you can chat with a specialist immediately to go over the application. I didn’t have to give any additional information during that chat and was approved in literally 2 minutes. The person I was chatting with even knew I had the same exact card. I wanted to make sure the bonus was attached to the application since the landing page still doesn’t make mention of it, and sure enough the representative confirmed the bonus of 50K miles after meeting the minimum spend requirement.

If you know how Citi works, you can make this a very lucrative way to earn AA miles. You can only apply for one Citi card per week, so you can apply for one on Day 1 and another on Day 9 (at least one FTer has done this successfully). Citi also has a rule of not allowing more than 2 applications in any 60 day period. So that means you can apply for a third card on Day 70 to get the bonus again, and so on and so on.

You can also mix some business applications in there as well, which run on a slightly different set of rules. The FlyerTalk thread has all this information detailed comprehensively in an FAQ section that I highly recommend reading if you’re interested in this.

In my opinion, given that this current deal has been going on for many months, it’s actually better than the defunct two-browser trick. While you used to be able to get two cards in the same day for the 100K mile haul, you were not able to churn those offers. You had to stop there until 12-18 months (or more) after those approvals before you could apply again. If this deal continues to last, you can rack up a lot more miles.

This deal is obviously not for everyone, but I do recommend making this card part of your next set of applications. The 50K AA miles are good for two domestic Economy tickets or a one-way business class ticket to/from Europe on any Oneworld airline. You can see AA’s partner award chart here if you’re curious how far you can get with this bonus.