It’s already been another year with the Citi Premier Card, and oh what a difference a year makes.
The one-year mark is when an important decision must be made: Keep it or cancel it?
Call Results: My Retention Offers for the Citi Premier Card:
Before making any “keep or cancel” decision, I always call the card company and see if there are any retention offers available.
I called Citi customer service at the number on the back of the card.
I quickly got a representative, told him I was trying to determine if I should keep the card. I explained I wasn’t sure if I wanted to pay $95 to keep the Premier card – especially when I found little use for it during the pandemic.
I asked him if there were any fee waivers or retention offers available to me.
He immediately came back and said, “I’m sorry, there are no offers available to you at this time. If you would like me to cancel this card for you, I can do it right now”.
I told him, “I wanted to think about it a little more before I made a decision”.
To Keep Or Cancel?
Well, I thought about it.
Soon after Citi’s decimation of the travel benefits to this “travel card”, they did somewhat of an about-face and issued a few minor improvements to the card, but at the expense of the 1.25 factor on travel redemptions through the Thank You portal.
As it turns out, the Premier’s 1.25 factor on travel redemptions ends on April 10, 2021.
This means there is one final “sweet spot” where I can use up my remaining Thank You points while doing the following:
- Receive $100 back in $500 hotel travel booked through the Thank you portal
- Redeem all points at the Premier’s 1.25 factor
- Receive 10% of those points refunded back to me with my Citi Rewards+ card
Here’s how the math works:
$500 (or 50,000 points for the price of hotel stay)
-$100 (or 10,000 points with the Premier’s annual hotel benefit)
= $400
-$80 (8,000 redeemed points saved using the Premier’s 1.25 factor)
=$320
-$32 (3,200 points refunded with the Rewards+ 10% points back benefit)
=$288 (or 28,800 points redeemed total for the stay)
I used this “sweet spot” trick last year for an effective 42.4% off our stay at the Sedona Rouge Hotel & Spa Trademark Collection By Wyndham.
The Bottom-Line: Call Results: My Retention Offers for the Citi Premier Card (2020):
Well, based on the above, it looks like the $212 [plus] I’ll save by redeeming all my Citi Thank You points by April 10, 2021, means the Citi Premier will be worth keeping at least one more year.
I personally don’t find much value in transferring Thank You points to the Citi Thank You travel partners.
So the question for me next year will be: Is the $100 I’d save with the Premier’s annual hotel benefit worth the trouble of a $95 annual fee?
Right now, barring any new benefits from Citi, I’m thinking it won’t be.
