Earn 70K Miles On The CitiBusiness AAdvantage Mastercard, Now With 3 Bonus Months! Plus, Spend Towards Million Miler Lifetime Elite Status!

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Update: DEAD!

Update: Note that the bonus and bonus point categories do not count for million miler status. Only base spending will count for million miler status.

Limited Time Offer: Earn 70,000 AA Miles On The CitiBusiness AAdvantage World Mastercard!

Signup bonus and extended threshold deadline:

For a limited time only, the CitiBusiness® / AAdvantage® Platinum Select® World Mastercard® is offering 70K AA miles for opening the card and spending $4,000 in 4 months.

Plus if you’re approved by 5/31, you’ll get an additional 3 months to complete the $4,000 of spending, for a total of 7 months to earn the signup bonus!

Other Citi AA consumer cards that you can also take advantage of an additional 3 months include the:

• Citi AA Mastercard: Earn 50,000 miles for spending $2,500 in 6 months.
• Citi AA Executive Mastercard: Earn 50,000 miles for spending $5,000 in 6 months.
• Citi AA MileUp card: Earn 10,000 miles+$50 statement credit for spending $500 in 6 months.

Annual fee:

The $99 annual fee is waived for the first 12 months with this offer.

Signup bonus rules:

• You can receive the bonus on this card if you haven’t received a bonus on a Citi AA business card in the past 48 months.
• You can get the bonus if you currently have a Citi AA business card and/or a Citi AA consumer card.
• You can get the bonus even if you recently got the bonus on a Citi AA consumer card.
• Citi allows applications for 1 card every 8 days and 2 cards every 2 months. Business cards are limited to once every 3 months. Add a few extra days in between applications to be safe.

Card earnings:

• Earn 2 miles per dollar on AA purchases, car rentals, gas, and telecom, internet, cable, or satellite service providers.
• Earn 1 mile per dollar elsewhere

Million Miler Lifetime Elite Status:

Since 2011, American has only counted actual flight miles towards earning million miler status.

However they recently announced that all miles earned from spending on US based AA credit cards that post to your account from 5/1/20-12/31/20 will count towards earning million miler lifetime elite status (we’ll call them MMLES).

You will earn 1 MMLES miles per dollar on all purchases. Unfortunately you won’t earn MMLES miles for the signup bonus or bonus miles on purchases in bonus categories.

Million Miler Tiers:

• You will earn lifetime Gold status and 35K bonus miles when you earn 1MM million miler miles.
• You will earn lifetime Platinum status and 4 systemwide upgrades when you earn 2MM million miler miles.
• Sadly, there is no way to earn Platinum Pro or Executive Platinum status, but you will earn 4 systemwide upgrades for each additional million miler threshold reached.

You can read about elite benefits here.

I earned lifetime Platinum status from opening AA credit cards back in the days when all AA miles counted towards million miler status.

I got my wife close by opening credit cards for her from when we got married in November 2008 until when the program ended in November 2011, but didn’t quite get her to 2MM:

You can login via this link to check how many MMLES miles that you have. After doing that you should see the screenshot above with your current million miler balance to see how much you’ll need to spend to get to the next threshold.

Card benefits:

• First check bag for cardholder and 4 companions is free on domestic flights, even on basic economy fares. You don’t need to pay for the flight with this card, you just need to make sure that your AA mileage number is in your reservation. That means you can get a free bag even when using partner award miles from airlines like BA or Alaska to book your AA flight.
• Priority boarding, even on basic economy fares.
• 25% off AA in-flight WiFi via statement credit rebate
• 25% off AA in-flight food and beverages via statement credit rebate
• 7,500 miles off flights to or from dozens of rotating cities.
• Annual $99 domestic main cabin companion certificate if you spend $30K/year on the card.
• No foreign transaction fees.

Mastercard Easy Savings:

Get a cash rebate on top of miles with select merchants by registering here.

Sample savings:

• 5% cash back at Avis
• 5% cash back at Budget
• 5% cash back at Firestone
• 5% cash back at Upside Travel
• 5% cash back at select gas stations (Enter zip code to search)

Using AA Miles:

While Delta and United have killed their award charts and increased miles needed for flights, American has retained published award charts for both AA and partner award flights.

When Delta and United eliminated their close-in award booking fees, they increased the miles needed for flights. American also removed their close-in booking fees, but they haven’t yet increased the miles needed for close-in flights.

Currently American has a 2 prong approach to mileage redemption that makes them far more versatile than other miles!

You can book tickets using AA award chart pricing here.

They also have dynamic web special pricing for coach, business, and first class awards.

You can book web special awards here.

I’ve posted web special awards such as just 5,000 miles for flights between the US and Australia/New Zealand and 20K miles to Israel. I used 10,000 miles to book a web special to Nassau earlier this year, when paid tickets were a small fortune, while United wanted 17,500 miles, and Delta wanted some 50,000 miles.

American also has a very useful award map here to help find cheap awards. Just use my tips here to help find 5K coach awards and 15K lie-flat first class awards.

American still has valuable partner awards on airlines like Alaska, Cathay Pacific, Etihad, and Air Tahiti Nui. Some partner flight must be booked over the phone while others have much better award availability by calling AA in Australia or New Zealand.

For example I used 105K American miles to fly in an apartment on Etihad Shower Class from the Maldives to Cleveland via Abu Dhabi and JFK. That’s now 115K as AA killed the award redemption rebate for cardholders earlier last year.

Though because of the #ElectronicsBan, I was stuck having to take pictures with my GoPro:

And my phone:

Just be sure to compare American’s requirements with other airlines before transferring.

In this post I compared how many miles are required to fly on every OneWorld route from JFK.

Business card info:

This is a business card, but you may already have a business that needs a card to keep track of expenses. For example if your name is Joe Smith and you sell items online, or if you have any other side business and want a credit card to better keep track of business expenditures you can open a business credit card for “Joe Smith” as the business. You don’t need to file any messy government paperwork to be allowed to do that. Just be sure to select “Sole Proprietorship” as the business type and just use your social security number in the Tax Identification Number field.

If you have business paperwork you can apply under your business name. Otherwise, it’s critical to just write your own name as the business name if you are just applying for your own small business as a Sole Proprietorship that doesn’t have any business paperwork. You can then send in bills in your own name for verification.

If you’re like me and you run more than one business, you can signup for multiple of the same card for each business to manage each businesses expenses separately.

Another benefit of the card not reporting on your personal credit report is that when you spend money on personal cards your credit score will be hurt even if you pay your bill on time. A whopping 30% of your credit score is based on credit utilization. You can pay off your card bill before your statement is generated to avoid that, but that takes effort and laying out money well before you have to. Additionally it’s good to have the statement close with a couple dollars to show the card is active and being paid every month. On an business cards from banks like AMEX, Chase, and Citi it’s just not reported, so you can wait until the money is due without it having a negative effect on your score. That also means if you close the card, it won’t have an effect on your credit score.

Will you signup for the CitiBusiness AAdvantage World Mastercard?