When I was re-establishing credit (stupid me, I had long dropped all my CCs in favor of a debit card for convenience) I opened a Citi secured card for the 25k max they allowed at the time. Six months later I had an emergency need to hire a jet charter. The cost was over 30k but the company agreed to take 20k on a CC and bill me for the rest. It was a card not present purchase since they have to fly to your closest airport. Citi declined when they tried to run it even though I had 23k avail credit. I called a Citi CSR and they quickly escalated but could find no reason for the decline though they could see it on their systems. We tried again - same result. In a three-way call. They tried a manual approval but the charter company did their billing through a third party and couldn't take a manual approval. The Citi csr then went off to check on "Something" and came back saying it was some sort of embedded security limit and they would have to fix it. After another 5 minutes they came back on the line and had the charter service try it again and it went through. All in all I found the Citi CSR responsive, friendly, and helpful in resolving this.
I'm guess the causes were related to:
1. I had never charged anything over 2k to the card and it was only 6 months old.
2. Card not present charges for a "service" have higher risk to the banks than normal purchases.
3. Citi may have well put in place some internal limit on their secured card after they reduced the max to 5k.
I re-emphasize that when I first called Citi they saw the decline but had no idea why it was declined. It took them additional investigation to locate the problem and resolve it so it isn't clear checking in advance would have prevented this. In my case it wasn't an option as I had no idea I would need to make this charge. I would make sure you take the CSR ph. no. and a cell phone when you make the purchase.
Citi, at 18 months, unsecured the card, and re-issued it for another 3 years but in the same "Citi Secured Card" classic blue plastic look. Very cute card that looks like it came out circa 1970. I love it.
I am rather fond of Citi as their online CC services are really good and terms are great. I especially love the virtual CC which makes me feel a lot safer using the card online with smaller merchants.
