nwflyboy

I think the lessons here are...

1. If you're going try and game the system, be sure you get your Barclays card(s) early in your app-o-rama history. If you're like many here, and you've been routinely churning chase, citi & amex cards with positive results, then you turn your attention to Barclays, you'll probably be OK getting your first and maybe your second card (of any type) from Barclays, but getting each subsequent card from Barclays will become increasingly unlikely or impossible. Getting a 2nd or 3rd copy of the same kind of Barclays card that you have also seems to crank up the difficulty a bit more.

2. If you've been churning other cards, you can try to "cool it" for a while in hopes of making approval more likely for your next barclay card, but you're probably going to need to be more patient than you think. Sitting it out (or "only getting one or two cards") during a few months doesn't look like it will move Barclays much - they seem to be scrutinizing your record going back 12 or maybe 24 months and counting the cards you've opened. So "sitting it out" may require sitting it out for a full year or more (which many of us find difficult).

3. It just may not be worth it. Yeah, you could check out for 18-24 months and let your credit report completely cool down to the point where Barclays is happy to extend a new card to you, but during that time you would be forgoing a lot of lucrative offers from other issuers. How badly do you really want that Barclays card?

4. Barclays ain't Chase (or Amex or Citi or BoA). They seem to operate quite differently, and you definitely should not expect your previous experience with other issuers to predict how Barclays will behave.

This is not an exact science. There are exceptions (both ways). We're all just making guesses. But I think the above points do seem to be generally true for most people.