How One Credit Card Saved Me $950 When My Bag Was Delayed

When I was flying to Michigan from Australia a couple of months ago, the airline I was flying with (temporarily) misplaced my bag. I was traveling with my boyfriend at the time, and since I booked my flights with a specific credit card, I was able to purchase a few items that were in our missing bag so that we could have warm clothes to wear during the holidays while we were visiting family.

The card I used to book the flights with was the Citi Prestige. For a while, the Citi Prestige was my go-to card for booking airfare because it offered the best travel insurance. If a flight was delayed for just three hours, it would offer coverage for food and other necessities. In 2018, Citi changed the benefit to only offer coverage on delays of 6+ hours, matching the Chase Sapphire Reserve’s insurance coverage, so I switched back to using the CSR for my flight bookings.

However, I booked my flights from Australia in January for which I paid with my Citi Prestige Card and since my bag was delayed, I had my first experience with making a claim through Citi.

It was a seamless, wonderful process. I seriously can’t stop praising it! I’ve submitted many trip delay claims with Chase over the years and there’s always a ton of back and forth. It often takes me months to get a claim to go through. With Citi, I submitted receipts and a statement from the airline about my bag delay via email and about 10 days later, I found that they would pay out the full amount for the items I had to purchase.

Since my boyfriend and I were flying from warm weather to cold weather on a long itinerary, we had packed all of our cold weather clothes into our checked bag so we wouldn’t have to carry it all around the airport for 36+ hours of travel. That meant we arrived in Michigan in December, sans coat, and wearing only the clothes we had traveled in. That wasn’t going to fly.

So, we headed out to the store and purchased the necessities to stay warm. In total, our bill was around $950. That would have been quite the Christmas present to ourselves if it hadn’t been for booking with my Citi Prestige. And our bag finally showed up about 40 hours after us.

After this experience with the Citi Prestige Card’s insurance claim process, it’s definitely become a card I’ll use in my rotation to book flights – but it’s not my top choice all of the time. I still use my Chase Sapphire Preferred card to book flights with connections that are under six hours, and let’s face it, most itineraries don’t have connections longer than that. I do it this way because the Citi Prestige card won’t cover trip delay expenses related to missed connections unless the delay of a singular flight is at least six hours. The Sapphire Reserve is still my top pick card for flights with connections, even though I know it will mean a lot of back and forth trying to get my insurance claim approved.

All in all, I was so impressed with the process of filing a baggage delay claim with Citi!

Have you ever filed a baggage delay claim with Citi or Chase? What was your experience like?

[Featured Image: Citi Prestige]