Citi Premier℠ Card

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With the Citi Premier℠ Card, you’ll earn rewards on travel, dining and entertainment, along with a generous bonus point offer after meeting the qualifying spend.

Here are the details:

First and foremost, you’ll earn 3X points on travel (including gas stations), 2X points at restaurants and on entertainment and 1X points on everything else.

Citi has quite a broad definition of what counts towards travel. For example, you’ll earn 3X points on everything from parking garages to tolls to travel agencies. As for the entertainment category, downloading music, going to a sporting event or catching a movie will all earn you 2X points per $1 spent.

The Citi Premier Card’s primary objective is to earn rewards toward air travel. If you don’t mind booking your flights through the Citi ThankYou portal, you’ll benefit greatly from owning this card.

Is this card right for you?

The Citi Premier is your match if you aren’t loyal to a particular airline but tend to travel often.

You won’t be charged any foreign transaction fees on purchases made outside of the U.S. and Citi ThankYou points are worth 25% more when redeemed for airfare through the ThankYou website. As an added bonus, there aren’t any blackout dates for airfare booked at thankyou.com.

The rewards on dining and entertainment are an additional perk to the card, but your primary benefit to applying should be the travel rewards.

How much are the rewards worth?

With the Citi Premier Card, there aren’t caps on spending categories. That means you can spend as much as you want, in turn receiving an unlimited amount of ThankYou® Points.

To get the most value out of this card, you’ll want to take advantage of the 25% boost to points when booking airline tickets at thankyou.com. For example, the 60,000-point bonus offer (after spending $4,000 in the first 3 months) would be redeemable for $750 in airfare when redeemed this way.

How to use this card

There are a few options when it comes to redeeming your ThankYou® Points. You can redeem for gift cards, statement credits, cash rewards, travel or shop with your points at Amazon.com or BestBuy.com.

For example, the 60,000 bonus point offer (after spending $4,000 in the first 3 months) is worth $600 in gift cards when redeemed as so, though we suggest that you stick to redeeming for air travel in order to extract the most value from the card.

Live music fanatics and sports fans will enjoy presale access to select event tickets and VIP packages via Citi® PrivatePass® — simply visit citiprivatepass.com for more information.

Travel benefits

The main allure of Citi Premier Card lies in its travel benefits. You can transfer your points to participating airline partners, and there’s no fee to redeem them. (keep in mind there’s a minimum transfer of 1,000 points). Citi’s airline partners include the following:

• Asia Miles
• Avianca
• Etihad
• Eva Air
• Flying Blue- Air France/KLM
• Garuda
• Jet Airways
• JetBlue
• Malaysia Airlines
• Qantas
• Qatar
• Singapore Airlines
• Thai Airways
• Turkish Airlines
• Virgin Atlantic

As you can see, Citi’s transfer partners are mainly overseas focused. This might limit your travel options should you tend to do most of your flying domestically.

With the exception of JetBlue, each of these airline partners transfer to Citi at a 1:1 ratio.

Card upgrading

After owning the Citi Premier Card for 12 months, you may be eligible for a card upgrade (depending on additional factors such as card usage and payment history).

Keep in mind that if you’re attempting to upgrade for a welcome bonus, Citi has a policy stating that Bonus ThankYou Points are not available to you if you’ve opened or closed a Citi card in the past 24 months.

The bottom line

All in all, the Citi Premier Card is a great option for those looking for a travel card with a wide variety of earning options.