10K miles through car purchase
 

A few weeks ago, while buying a car, I decided pay the puchase price with an
AAdantage credit card.
The vendor said only 5K will be accepted since "it is our policy".
I negotiated it to 10k after threatening to walk away from the
sale. For 2/3 mins of work I ended up with 10K miles.

There have been several threads on using credit cards at car dealerships, with some strategies that have worked and some that haven't. Here are a few:

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/showthread.php?t=446719
http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/showthread.php?t=447305
http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/showthread.php?t=409277

great deal...did they charge you any extra for the merchant fee?

I just charged the 3K downpayment for my Accord lease. Dealer didnt wanna take the CC at first but since it was the holiday weekend (12/26) I said no banks were open (they wanted a bank check) and well how bad do they want the sale before the end of the year, since I was going away on the 27th til 30th.

They did not take AmEx though. They get charged 4% using Amex. They only accepted Master and Visa.. so i went with my Amazon card...

When we bought my '05 Acura RL, they originally let us put up to $10,000 on a credit card. After that, we'd pay half of the merchant fee. After some haggling we got it up to $12500 then $16000, then finally $24,000. We were happy. We were going to pay cash anyway, so why not charge it when we'll just pay it back next month? We were denied at first, but I called up Citibank and they lifted my "per-transaction" limit.

Then, on our next car purchase, for an '05 Honda Odyssey, they had a strict limit of only $4500 on credit cards, but we got it up to $6,700. The month before we did this, my wife opened a new Discover Platinum card. She decided to charge it to that. We had no interest for 11 more months and then paid that little down payment off. So, with a little research and haggling, you could put the whole car on a 12-month 0% APR credit card and get the miles (and Blue from AMEX (not Blue Cash) gives you 0% for 15 months)!

When I bought my new 1999 Buick LeSabre in Ohio, the dealer let me charge the whole price to my Citibank AA MC but charged me the 2% merchant fee. I said OK because my CD would mature the following month & it was more convenient than applying for a loan 2B repaid in 20--30 days. The fee & the miles neutralized each other for me.

When I bought a car here in NC in 2004, no go.

Car dealers hate the dispute mechasnism in credit cards more than they hate the merchant fee. The ability to pull back part of the payment is very annoying to a car dealer. If you were able to do the whole thing on a credit card that quite impressive, it would be unheard of in CA to be able to do anything similar.

Huh? Citibank Amex? I thought that was coming this month for the first time?

Sorry, I meant Citibank AA MasterCard!

wow, im going to have to try this next time