Results from My Last Round of Credit Card Applications 2

Today was my churn day, 3 months after my last round of credit card applications. I discussed my thought process of applying for credit cards this time around in a previous post, and I settled on applying for 4 credit cards: the US Bank Club Carlson Personal, US Bank Club Carlson Business, Bank of America Alaska Airlines, and Chase Hyatt.

In preparation for applying for the US Bank Club Carlson cards, I sent requests to ARS and IDA to place security freezes on my profile about two weeks ago. This tactic has been widely discussed in the Flyertalk thread on the Club Carlson credit card, and the linked post on HackMyTrip is a great reference. Essentially, US Bank pulls reports from ARS and IDA, and people who are actively applying for multiple credit cards every year have had problems getting approved for new cards. For some reason, once people freeze their credit reports on ARS and IDA, they usually get instantly approved, in spite of active credit card churning activity.

Given that I’ve applied for 8 new credit cards in the past year, I thought it would be a good idea to freeze my reports on ARS and IDA, and lo and behold, I was instantly approved for the US Bank Club Carlson Personal card. This was my only instant approval for the day. I was met with a pending decision for the business version, and I’m not too surprised by that.

I next applied for the Bank of America Alaska Airlines card. I last got this card a year ago, and I called last week to cancel the credit card, but the customer service rep ended up downgrading my card to a no annual fee card rather than canceling my card. After applying, I got a pending screen, but I called Bank of America’s personal credit card status application phone number (877-721-9405, then option 3) and heard that my application was approved.

My final application was for the Chase Hyatt card. The card now has no annual fee for the first year, but as an added bonus, if you start to make a Hyatt reservation via Hyatt.com, prior to booking you should see an offer for the Chase Hyatt card that offers an additional $50 statement credit after first purchase. I did this and applied via the $50 statement credit application and received another pending screen. I called Chase’s reconsideration line at 888-245-0625 and was told that my application merely needed to be verified and was approved after a very short hold time.

All in all, that’s 3 approvals out of 4 applications with one application still pending. The card that I most wanted the approval for was the US Bank Club Carlson card, and I’m happy that that came through with an instant approval.