Ok, so the Great Race is over. You just got done earning/spending/buying/churning your way to gold and have accepted that platinum will never happen in your life time. But hey, at least you have the gold status and all of its perks, including priority boarding. But about a month ago, Citibank/AA changed the Platinum Select / AAdvantage Visa Signature / AAdvantage World Mastercard / AAdvantage World Elite Mastercard / AAdvantage American Express cards to include some of the gold perks including first free bag and priority boarding (with gold members).

I have nothing against the first free bag, because the more checked bags, the quicker the TSA lines & boarding will be. But giving away priority boarding, just seems to minimize the value of gold. Now anyone can have the priority boarding of gold with a credit card that can easily be had at no cost. To be fair to the gold and platinum members, AA should create a new priority category for these credit card members. Or AA could let the gold members board at the same time as the platinum members, but this would infringe on the platinum members. Of course, this infringement would be less than what AA has just done to the gold members.

The gold members have been pretty quite about this over the last month, so I was curious if I was the only one that cared.