wyogold

AMEN!! Off-topic, but I'm at the AA flagship lounge in LAX, on the way back from a five day excursion to Tokyo with my son, flying out in F (HND) and returning in C (KIX) on JAL for $112 and 270K miles. This trip is courtesy of Citi, and I will happily deal with fraud prevention calls on the days I pay my $4K + change credit card bills. I *LOVE* Citi.

As has been mentioned before, this *IS* the good old days. I doubt there will ever be a churn as epic as the Great Mailer Churn of 2017-2018 (and who knows, maybe '19 and beyond).

teddy25

wyogold

that was a better deal, true, but I think the mailer churn had been going on longer than the exec churn at this point. Either way both are epic. Looking forward to your story, but hopefully it will be a while. Being reminded of the exec churn gives me hope that there will be another churn once the mailers end.

AugustWest

Beg to differ. Those 100k offers were nice but they took $10K of spend and you had to do quick turnarounds to avoid the huge annual fee. With mailers we can get 70K for $3k spend and can be more relaxed about it. I have earned well over a million miles with mailers and am still going strong. Much better deal imho.

SeeBuyFly

I seem to recall 75k for $1500 spend.

Insder

The best of both worlds were the leaked no 24-month language links end of 2016 into 2017. 60k offer for $3k spend and AF waived and plenty of links available with no mailer codes/etc. And Citi had not yet started triggering a million fraud alerts. Unfortunately, Citi has now made it near impossible to spider for links. They throttle based on IP address, user agent, and even geolocation. Thankfully, the mailer codes are plentiful.

AugustWest

Correct!
I had forgotten about those links! True heroes those folks who dug them up.

teddy25

10k back in the day only took 30mins, local groceries store to pick up 10k gift card then either WMBP or bluebird With 5x2k transactions.

sdsearch

Whatever churns you do these days only earn AA miles.

I would say the most "epic" Citi AA churns would be pre-Dec 2011, if you were able to use them not just to earn AA miles but also to earn AA lifetime status (1 million lifetime miles gave AA liftetime Gold, 2 million lifetime miles gave AA lifetime Platinum). In Dec 2011 AA changed lifetime status to only count paid flown miles. (And it was by far the last airline to allow miles from credit cards to count toward lifetime status, since when I started churning AA around 2004 it was already the only one.)

I estimate that I churned over 1 million AA miles between 2004 and 2011 (since I earned a total of 2 million during that time, about 6 months before it stopped working). Maybe that's not as fast as someone with mailers can do it today, I dunno, but doing it back then, even when it was only 25k per card (but two cards at a time every 65 days) with sub-$1000 minimum spends, was "stacking" RDMs plus lifetime status miles back then with each churn, and no one today can do that.

And the race to get to a million mile marker before AA changed how lifetime status works (a change had been repeatedly rumored for years before it actually changed in Dec 2011), there's no long-term race any more (related to churning) than I can see that compares to that.

LWT3

Vanilla Reload was working too then, right? And with the Exec, they literally paid you to take 100K miles.

teddy25

VR helped a lot too!

wyogold

That is a good point. I just started churning around that time and only got a couple 100K miles in before the change. OTOH, status isn't nearly as valuable as it used to be, with the current high load factors upgrades are not very likely depending on the route.

Also, even though you got 'only' 25 K miles per card, miles went much further before the devaluations that since happened.

Being reminded at how long it's been Citi / AA has been allowing churning, I am hopeful for the future. This train may still have legs left.

Insder

I strongly miss the old days of buy VR and unload from the comfort of my home onto Bluebird. Last week, a Walmart cashier recognized me at a grocery store in town and I had to re-evaluate my life for a moment.

teddy25

fromfall98

Aaaaahhh..... the good old days! last quarter of 2011 is exactly when I found FT and learned that one could get multiple Citi / AA cards! I was sitiing at around 900K lifetime miles (most of them BIS miles) and got a few cards to get over the hump of 1MM !!! Though being LT Gold is not that valuable these days, I do like having that status. I wish I had known about FT / churning before that time and earned LT Plat. With new rules, getting it now is next to impossible

Cheers!