No, only the HHonors Amex gives the Gold for spending $20,000. Both the HHonors Amex and Visa will grant you silver upon getting the card, but Silver isn't worth much with Hilton.

Can you get AA gold from having no status with the Citibank card? How much spending is required?

AA gives lifetime Gold for one million total lifetime miles, lifetime Platinum for two. All miles from all sources, including credit card spending, count - so it's $1M or $2M if you have no other miles from any source at all. However, if you have no status, you can earn a maximum of 60K to 100K miles per year from a card, so it can take a very long time to reach Gold that way unless you have more than one credit card (does this work, or are they onto this loophole?) or earn some of your miles from other sources (like, f'rinstance, actually flying). Once you hit 1MM and earn Gold the limit goes away, so you can get from Gold to Platinum in a hurry if you spend fast enough.

If you earn using the SPG Amex, you can transfer points to AA miles and not only get around that cap, but get a 25% bonus on transfers in 20K blocks.

I've got 60k AA points from citi credit card (in last 6 months or so), but I have zero qualifying points.

Am I missing somthing?

Yes.

Your credit card miles do not earn EQMs (elite qualifying miles) so you still need to fly 25K EQMs for Gold status. AA only counts actual flight miles (and class-of-service bonuses) towards qualifying for annual status, hence the acronym EQM.

However, your credit card miles DO count towards the 1M lifetime miles needed for lifetime AA Gold status. AA counts ALL miles earned in your account towards the lifetime status, no matter how you earned them.

Priority Club Visa, 60k points in one year will get you Plat.

I now understand. Thanks:)

Come to think of it, the same way of getting around the annual cap (but with no bonus, except for occasional promos) should work with Diners Club too. DC, thanks to their deal with MasterCard, is accepted in many places that AmEx-branded cards aren't.

(And thanks to Boraxo for a very clear explanation of that other bit.)

True, though then you're also hit with the DC transfer fee.

Two other ways around it:

(1) Get multiple Citi cards - the annual cap is per card. If you churn cards, you could hit 1M in about two years just from the bonuses.
(2) Sign up for the gold or plat challenge on AA and do a mileage run. It'll give your friends and family the opportunity to think you're a little weird.

How soon soon would you like the status, what do you want from the status, and how much credit card spend do you do per (month or year) average that you could steer to this/these card(s)?

The reason for these followup quesitons is that the answer is often "yes, but unless you have high spending all the time it may not be a good way to do it".

For example, Priority Club gives you Gold status at 20k points no matter how you earn them, and Platinum status at 60k points no matter how you earn them. But to earn them through a credit card, you've got to put many tens of thousands of dollars on it. On the other hand, if you go to the Priority Club forum and pay attention to the "bonus offers" sticky, you'll find that there are so many promos you can register for that run concurrently that many people get Gold status after just a few nights and Platinum status after less than a dozen stays early in the year (even at inexpensive properties), so what's the point of wiating until you've spend tens of thousands of dollars to do it by credit card spending? And Platinum at Priority Club gets you even more points (so free stays quickly), but is not as reliable at upgrades as, say HHonors Gold, and does not get you free breakfast and other similar perks the way HHonors Gold. But OTOH HHonors runs (untargeted) promos very rarely, so if that's the program you want, the credit card route might be relatively better there.

If you live somewhere where AA works for you as well as any other airline, then I'd say that's the long term holy grail, because it's the only airline where you can get lifetime elite status through any kind of mileage earning (including credit cards). And once you earn them, you can even use them for things like hotel stays (if you don't need all those miles for flights), since it's how many miles you earned, not your balance, that matters toward lifetime status. But it doesn't earn you any status (if you're not qualifying by flying) at all until you get to 1 million lifetime earned miles, at which point you're suddenly AAdvantage Gold for life.

By the way, the way to earn miles through credit cards at AA is not to use one (unless you've got a lot of credit card spend a year, as in six digits at least), but rather to "churn" them. Unlike Chase, Citi still allows churning, and allows you to apply for 2 cards every 60 days, and right now lots of cards give 15k to 25k bonuses for $250 to $750 in purchases during the first few months, with first year annual fee waived. So apply, purchase, cancel, lather, repeat, and you get way more miles than you'd ever get from spending alone if you only have five digits of spending you can put on a card per year.

Completely opposite is United, where you can "pre-buy" status for a year by paying a lot up front, and then what you've paid up front can be used to pay for flights for the rest of the year. But if you only want inexpensive domestic flights, you're likely to lose a lot on this.

Finally, bear this in mind: Status is fairly usless on an airline you're not going to fly much, or at a hotel chain you're not going to stay in much. And there are other ways to "bootstrap yourself" into status, like Challenges at AA, and status match at some other airlines or some hotel chains. Few credit cards will get you status quickly.

And remember, with the exception of lifetime status, all status has to be requalified for every year, with limited exceptions like "soft landings" (drop only one status level a year) at some programs. So if it takes you much more than a year of credit card use to get enough points to earn status, that may not help you consistently!

Inasmuch as the OP's profile includes ...

[Screw you AAdvantage!]

... I daresay s/he is not interested in advice on obtaining lifetime status on American Airlines ;) . Of course the thread should still include such information for others who are interested in the same proposition.

Hahah Indeed. Thats there because a bunch of miles had expired on me, I received no notice that it was going to happen, etc. etc... there was a good period when I was not doing any travel. Now things are a little different, I am willing to consider going back to AA - if the reasons are right.

As for churning cards and whatnot... how does that effect one's credit score? Negatively? No? Explain please :)

Not signifcantly. A teeny bit nagetively, but in general worth worrying about if you've otherwise got good credit. Ie, it might drop you ten or twenty points temporarily, but not cumulatively, since it'll only be affected at most by the last few months of churning at any time. (And thus if you keep churning, it'll level out, and if you decide to stop churning, the tiny negative effect will go away soon thereafter, all other things being equal.)

Your credit score is much more affected by your ratio of total credit available to total credit used, your on-time payment and always paying at least $1 more than the minimum (since they have a flag which simply say's "piad minimum" vs "paid more than minimum")*, the age of your credit history (thus cancel your most recently acquired cards, and never cancel cards you've had for decades).

And note that the latter point fits in perfectly with churning! In churning, you're cancelling the cards after you get the bonus, so you're cancelling new cards with little credit history, and thus it hurts your credit score neglibly.

Thus that only teeny negative dip on your credit score is going to be from the recent inquiry count.

And meanwhile, if you don't have much credit available at Citi now but they give you a bunch on your first card or two, then that aspect raises your credit score, so in that case it may balance out or even go net positive! But if you already have several cards with high credit available at Citi, they'll likely just shuffle that available creidt around into the new cards you apply for.

*For value reasons, of course, you always want to pay the balance in full every month. But from a credit score standpoint, all that matters is that it be at least $1 more than the minimum every month so that it's not flagged as "just the minimum", and that you keep the total balance on your cards low compared to the total credit available.