For those of you who have read the blog before you may already know that I have a troubled relationship with the AAdvantage Aviator lineup of credit cards from Barclays US. Late last year I decided to open the AAdvantage Aviator Red card in order to earn $3,000 EQD this year through credit card spend. In 2017 I barely qualified for Executive Platinum and I wanted to make sure that I’d earn enough EQD in 2018 to qualify again.
About halfway through this year I received an offer to upgrade my Aviator Red card to the Aviator Silver card. At that point in the year I had no interest in upgrading. However, I eventually decided to upgrade because with the Aviator Silver card I’d also earn 5,000 EQM while on the way to earning the $3,000 EQD. Like I said at the beginning of this post, it’s been a troubled relationship to say the least.
Well, it seems my relationship with the AAdvantage Aviator Silver card is finally over as I no longer have a reason to put any spend on the card. A few days ago the Elite Qualifying Dollars (EQD) offered by the card posted to my AAdvantage account.
My Barclays US AAdvantage Aviator Silver Card EQD Posted
As I mentioned previously, AAdvantage Aviator Silver card holders can earn $3,000 EQD after spending $25,000 on the card annually. I’ve been putting all of my miscellaneous spend on this card all year and happy to say that my EQD have finally posted.
As I expected, the EQD posted after my credit card statement closed rather than when I hit the $25,000 threshold. So, my statement closed on the 15th of the month and the EQD posted a few days later.
When the EQD posted I had enough EQM to qualify for Executive Platinum so the extra EQD allowed me to officially qualify once again for Executive Platinum. That qualification was reflected just minutes after the EQD posted to my account.
How To Track Your AAdvantage Aviator Silver Card Annual Spending?
One thing that surprised me about this card is that there is not a widget which shows your annual progress. Delta clearly shows your annual progress to waiving the MQD requirement so I’m sad to see American doesn’t do the same. Instead, I’ve been tracking my annual spending through a monthly spreadsheet where I plug in my statement balance.
There is another way to track your annual spending on this card. To find how close you are to earning the extra EQM or EQD begin by logging into your Barclays US account. Next, click on the Activity & Statements drop down and select the Spend Analyzer tool.
Once in that tool you can change your date range to see your annual spending. I selected the last 12 months as I put $0 of spend on this card until Jan 1, 2018.
From there you’ll see how much spend you’ve put on the card and how close you are to the $25,000 or $50,000 required to earn the bonus EQD.
My Plans For The Aviator Silver Card
Full disclosure, I plan to close my Barclays AAdvantage Aviator Silver card after the end of the year. I will write more on the topic once I close the card, but felt I should comment on this now.
See, at the end of the day the Aviator card just doesn’t fit my wallet. I have no incentive to put any spend on the card because I don’t want to earn AAdvantage miles. I’d much rather earn the Chase Ultimate Rewards points or Amex Membership Rewards points offered by my other cards. Additionally, as I realized this year, I didn’t need the EQD offered by this card to qualify. I ended up flying enough in 2018 to earn Executive Platinum status on my own so using this card this year proved worthless.
I could use the extra EQD next year though because American recently increase the requirement for Executive Platinum to $15,000 EQD. However, in tandem, Barclays/American halved the EQD benefit to just $3,000 EQD after $50,000 of annual spend. Barclays also eliminated the EQD benefit from the Aviator Red and Blue cards altogether. So, all in all, I just don’t have any use fo the Aviator card in the future and will close the account after the first of the New Year.
Final Thoughts
This year was quite the experiment. I wasn’t sure how many EQD I was going to earn through flying this year so I decided to supplement some EQD through this credit card. As the year went by I realized two things. First, putting any extra spending you may have on this card stinks. Second, I ended up not needing the EQD offered by the card anyway. So, while I’m glad the EQD posted I also am frustrated.
Looking back I wish I wouldn’t have opened the Aviator Red card or upgraded to the Aviator Silver card. In total I wasted about $195 of annual fees and missed out on earning at least 25,000 to 30,000 of Chase Ultimate Rewards points. While I appreciated the experience the lesson I’ve learned is to once again shy away from co-branded credit cards.
