I’ve written before about my quest to make the most of the impending changes to the Citi Prestige card. This is Citi’s high-end ($450 per year) ThankYou rewards card, and it’s features are set to change dramatically on October 19th. I applied for the card recently with the goal of eking out as many rewards as possible from both the old version of the card and the new.
For a summary of what has gone before, please see: Going for $700, double rewards, free worldwide companion ticket and more.
Results to-date:
Some of the soon to be gone card benefits include: Flight points, annual $200 airline fee credit, and an annual companion ticket. Here’s the status of each:
Flight Points
As I described in my previous post on this topic, I booked a number of near-term long distance award flights and paid for the fees with my Prestige card in the hopes that I would earn distance based Flight Points. I then changed the awards to later dates before canceling them.
Once earned, Flight Points become valuable ThankYou points when they are matched with base ThankYou points earned from spend. In other words, until I run out of Flight Points, my Prestige card will earn an extra point per dollar for all spend.
Even though the Flight Points benefit is going away, Citi will continue to allow cardholders to use already earned Flight Points.
Result: My statement closed two days ago, but I couldn’t find anything in the statement or online showing whether or not I had earned Flight Points. So, I called. The agent I spoke with confirmed that I had over 28,000 Flight Points pending! Success!
Towards $700
The current card benefits reimburse up to $200 per calendar year in airline fees. The new benefits reimburse up to $250 for any airline charges. My hope has been that I could earn $200 before October 19th and then $250 on or after October 19th, and then another $250 beginning in January. In reality, they probably won’t reimburse more than $250 altogether this year, but it can’t hurt to try! Remember those award tickets I booked? I made sure that each one was less than $100 so that they would be reimbursed.
Result: My statement clearly shows the $200 reimbursement. Success!
Companion Ticket
Even though the companion ticket benefit is going away, I have a year from the date of application to use this. I haven’t had a chance to look into this yet.
Signup Bonus
Even though there’s a 60,000 point signup bonus (details here), it requires a visit to a Citi branch office. Without one nearby, I settled instead for the 30,000 point online offer requiring only $2K of spend. Success:
Looking forward
Beginning October 19th, the Prestige card will have a few desirable new features. One of the best is its 3X category bonus for airlines, hotels, and travel agencies. The “travel agencies” part of this is intriguing since I recently wrote that the Best option when paying for flights is to go through portals to online travel agencies. As of October 19th, the Prestige card becomes the best credit card to use when going this route (hat tip: Rapid Travel Chai).
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[…] My progress towards Citi Prestige 30K and $700 […]
Any status update on the $250 after Oct 19th? Will there be a follow up post to come?
[…] October 19th, and another $250 next year. You can read the latest status of this quest here: My progress towards Citi Prestige 30K and $700. Thanks to specific features of this card, the 30K US Airways mileage run looks more attractive […]
[…] on this is also $450, but the costs more than outweigh the benefits, as explained by Frequent Miler here. I also have a decent stash of Thank You Points and am going to remain an American Airlines flyer […]
The companion ticket only works in Economy and the website (Spirit Incentives!) has an odd choice of carriers. You usually get much more expensive flights and taxes/ fuel surcharges than you’d expect.
TJ, yep I’m aware of that, but I’m thinking of trying to book Delta coach tickets and use global upgrade certificates to make the flights bearable. We’ll see.
Thanks for the update! Do you need to be enrolled in the travel benefit program to get the flight points? I just called to signup today and they said it will take 10 days to be active. Was thinking about using the flight points trick today before the new benefits kick in tomorrow, but might be too late.
Sorry for answering too late, but I think the Flight Points benefit kicked in automatically.
FYI, a month ago I applied citi gold checking online, then the citi prestige credit card online. Automatically, I was charged $350 annual fee instead of $450.
Thanks that’s very good to know.
Great post! Could you explain a bit on how you got 28,000 flight points?
I booked a few long distance award flights and paid the taxes and fees with the Prestige card. They somehow calculate the distance of the flights to award Flight Points. I then changed the dates of those flights to later, but it still looked to the Prestige card as if I already took those flights.
So which of the old benefits would I be able to take advantage of if I applied (and got approved) today? Is it too late?
It’s too late now although I guess it is theoretically possible to still get in on the one year for the companion ticket. I’m not sure.
How long did it take for airline fee reimbursement to post? Bought a $75 Delta GC a week ago but seeing no credit.
The reimbursements didn’t post until my statement closed.