Originally Posted by sdsearch

We have more datapoints for downgrades to DoubleCash and such, we may not have as many datapoints for downgrades to Citi AA Bronze (dunno if any datapoints for downgrades to Citi AA Gold), so it's harder to make an absolute statement about it. But let it suffice to say is that we haven't yet heard of a downgrade that didn't count as closing. So your odds aren't that good, but if you want to be our guinea pig so we can improve the wiki with a definite statement that it won't count, be our guest...

In other words, this is a world where it's hard to be absolute, because don't really know Citi's internal rules, we just form an impression of what those rules seem to be based on datapoints. When the datapoints are incomplete, we have to extrapolate.

So from a scientific perspective, I don't think we "know" that converting Citi AA Plat to Citi AA Gold definitely counts as a closure. It's just such a strong likelihood, based on other things that have counted as a closure, that it seems an incredibly high risk.

And Citi AA Gold still has an annual fee, while losing benefits like 10% rebate on redemptions (capped at 10k/year), so that's probably why no one has considered downgrading just to Citi AA Gold before. They either consider downgrading to Citi AA Bronze or some other non-AA Citi card, and in all reported cases of those they have all counted as closures AFAIK.