Our Interesting Application-Spree Experience with Barclays

When I recently wrote about my 2025 miles and points resolutions, I highlighted a goal to pursue strategic card applications while taking advantage of some limited time opportunities. Two of those opportunities exist today on Barclays credit cards; the American AAdvantage Aviator Red and Hawaiian Airlines cards.

While the current offers are not quite as attractive compared to when we applied in late December and early January (70k points after first purchase), the opportunities are limited because it is expected both of these cards will become unavailable at some point this year due to Citi becoming the sole issuer of American cards and the Hawaiian/Alaska Airlines merger.

It is also currently possible to transfer points between your Hawaiian and Alaska accounts and transfer Hawaiian points between different accounts for free as long as the recipient holds a Hawaiian credit card. This creates a window of opportunity to consolidate points from multiple Hawaiian accounts into one Alaska account which is very attractive!

Our Applications

For this application-spree, within my family we applied for a total of 8 cards, both the Aviator Red and Hawaiian cards for me, my wife and both my parents. We applied on different days from each other, but each person applied for the two cards back-to-back on the same day, first the Hawaiian card then the Aviator. The credit pulls were all from Transunion and did combine so we each only received one hard pull of our credit report.

Despite all having >800 credit scores, we only had 3 out of the 8 cards automatically approve, the Hawaiian card for me, my wife and my dad. The other 5 all went pending. I had read about some very involved security verifications with Barclays, so we decided to wait and see how the others played out.

Results of the Other 5 Applications

• My Aviator card: auto approved after a few days. Nothing exciting here.
• My dad’s Aviator: stayed pending for a long time then he eventually got a letter saying he needed to go through security verification. He chose to just let it expire after 30 days.
• My mom’s Aviator: ditto
• My mom’s Hawaiian: also stayed pending for several days and then changed to a denial based on some reasons related to lack of credit union accounts and revolving balance. Since my parents never carry a balance on their credit cards they were confused about this but they did have higher than normal utilization at the time from buying an appliance over the holidays. Fortunately, after calling reconsideration, she was able to get the card approved once they saw the balance on her other card was paid off.
• My wife’s Aviator: this one was the most interesting of the group. After sitting in pending for over 10 days, she decided to call in to check on the application. They said it required additional security information to be verified.

Barclays’ “Thorough” Security Verification Process

Unfortunately, with Barclays, this verification process is pretty onerous and required mailing in a copy of her Social Security card, driver’s license and a utility bill. We sent the documents through certified mail and called back a week later. Everything looked good except the seal on her Social Security card was “a little hard to read”. We were shocked to hear that would be enough for them to not move forward considering the other documents were totally fine. The only other option we were given was to mail a full copy of our latest tax return….yikes!

After calling a second time to verify what we were hearing was correct, we said we would send another set of copied with multiple versions of the card that would clearly show the seal. We took photos with different angles and bright lighting and did some quick editing to make sure that seal was super-visible. I also make some enlarged photocopies with different settings to make sure there would be no confusion the second time.

We mailed off a total of 4 different views and after a week, called the reconsideration line again. They connected us with the security team who was quickly able to review the documents and move forward with the approval…..except they decided they needed one final security verification. The agent we spoke to said they needed to call the phone number associated with the application and my wife needed to answer it to prove her identity. That sounded a bit strange to us since she was already on the phone with them and we assumed they could see she was calling from that number. Despite that, she was able to answer the new call without dropping the old one and it was pretty quick and easy to complete the verification. Finally, after all of that, she was approved for the Aviator card!

Lessons Learned

Despite the painful security verification process, we are very happy that we will earn 420k total miles (280k Hawaiian and 140k American) with essentially no minimum spend from this group of applications. I am confident my parents could also have been approved for the Aviator card if they had gone through the same process, but I didn’t want them to have to deal with it.

While not our first ever Barclays cards, it was our first experience dealing with both reconsideration and security verification. Each time called the hold times were minimal and each Barclays team member we spoke to was very pleasant and professional.

Overall, it goes to show that sometimes persistence is important in this hobby. Never accept a denial without calling reconsideration and be prepared to jump through a few hoops if necessary; the juice can be worth the squeeze!

TL;DR: My family will earn 420k miles on a recent application-spree with the Barclays Hawaiian and American Aviator Red cards. Despite a difficult process to get one of the cards approved, the learning and eventual approval made it worthwhile. We were happy to take advantage of these limited time offers, particularly the ability to combine Hawaiian miles across accounts and transfer them to Alaska miles.