Originally Posted by gophish11

For the past 10 years, I've been putting nearly all my spending on cobranded AAdvantage cards - mostly out of convenience and no real desire to pay attention to the missed opportunity cost. I often fly on AA or OW partners, book my hotels through aadvantagehotels.com (before that bookaahotels). I've naturally qualified for EP the last 7 years or so, with between 250-300k LPs, mostly through flying, then hotels, then CC spend (probably only around $30k/year going on my card).

I've held both the Citi AAdvantage Executive card (for lounge access) and the Barclay Aviator Red card for probably 5 years, and have blindly been putting all my work travel on the Barclay card. I only recently realized I was getting 2x miles on my AA flights and 1x miles for hotel spend, when I could have been getting 4x and 10x respectively - easily missing out on a few hundred thousand miles over this time.

This has led me to finally take enough of an interest to evaluate my approach and make a major shift.

My plan:
- Keep the Citi Executive card for AC access. Move my hotel spend to this card when booking through aadvantagehotels when there are solid bonus miles offers. The AC access and 20k bonus LPs are worth the annual fee for me. Using it correctly for 10x earning on hotels will easily net me an additional 50-60k LPs each year.-.