Citi Platinum Select/AAdvantage Card Special Bonus: 3X American Airlines AAdvantage Miles

Do you own a Citi Platinum Select/AAdvantage Visa Signature Card?

I got this card in March 2011 when there was bigger promotion of 50,000 bonus miles (now as a new cardholder, you can still receive 30,000 miles). But immediately after I got the bonus miles which required me to spend $1,000 in the first three months of card membership, the card has been lying in my drawer collecting dust. Actually, the only reason I got the card was for the bonus miles, so I didn’t find much use of it afterwards. But it looks I may need to dust it off and put it back in my wallet, at least for a short while.

A letter from Citi Bank arrived last night containing a special promotion for existing AAdvantage Visa Signature Card customers. From now until September 30, 2012, existing cardholders are able to earn 3x American Airlines AAdvantage miles on purchases made at supermarket, drugstores, gas stations, and restaurants.

I know there isn’t really anything *special* about this offer. There are quite a few rewards cards that allow cardholder earn bonus rewards, such as 3% instead of the normal 1% cashback, during a certain period of time when shopping in certain bonus categories. Usually, these bonus shopping categories rotate every three months. Chase Freedom Card is one popular rewards card that has shift from fixed rewards to rotating bonus rewards recently and Discover Card has been doing this forever.

I am not really a big fan of such rewards mechanism (that’s exactly the reason I have abandoned Chase Freedom card completely, which used to be my favorite) for the reason that I have to keep track of different cards’ different bonus rewards categories at different time of the year in order to get the maximum benefits, which could become a big hassle if these parameters keep changing all the time. True, if I could keep up with these rotating categories, I would earn more cashback with those cards I own. But I consider that too much work. So instead I opt to using only three cards with fixed rewards: PenFed Platinum Cash Rewards Card at gas stations (5%), AMEX TrueEarnings Card at Costco, and Fidelity 529 Card everywhere else (2%). I likely have missed some bonuses by not optimizing my card usage, but things are much easier for me

Anyway, despite my strong dislike of the rotating categories, I did enrolled in this special promotion (yes, you have ENROLL in most of the rotating bonus rewards categories in order to receive the extras benefits and that’s one more thing I don’t like) so I can earn a few more miles before I cancel the card.

While the special offer looks good for the promotional period, there’s a catch though. “AAdvantage® bonus miles awarded with this offer are subject to a cap of 2,500 AAdvantage® miles.” That translates to a spending of $1,250 in about two months to get the bonus miles in full.