Hello fellow flyertalkers and my best of wishes for a happy and healthy New Year!

I've been lurking on these forums since beginning my job as a traveling consultant last year but haven't decided to post until a recent issue I had with Citi compelled me to break my silence. It goes like this:

I signed up for the Citi Thankyou Premier card last March under the auspices that for each mile flown I would receive the equivalent in Thankyou points. I understood the requirement for equivalent spending; as a consultant posting all of my gas, airfare, and miscellaneous transactions on this card, I had no problem meeting this requirement.

The issue came when I was expecting the flight points to be posted to my account automatically...they weren't. I called both Thankyou and Citi and they said that they would create an incident. I never heard from them and never saw the points being credited to my Thankyou account.

I've flown 40,000+ miles on ~30 trips in 2011 and so far have only received 7500 points in flight points. I sent Citi a spreadsheet with the dates and itineraries of each transaction tied to airfare. They acknowledged that they had gaps in the posting of flight points but then insisted that I had to go through additional legwork to find *each* boarding pass and fax it to them. I cried BS, citing the terms and conditions which only mentions that a third-party OAG Worldwide would perform the research on the back-end, freeing me from having to deal with this crap.

I understand that some of you have the spare time to go through these hoops to ensure that you get the miles you've earned. However, I fail to see why I should invest extra time to get these points and argue with representatives when it states clear and simple that a third-party is supposed to perform this duty and there is no fax number or steps listed for the cardholder to ensure that points that were implicitly supposed to be posted automatically are matched.

Unless this gets resolved to my satisfaction, I'll be cancelling the Citicard and will probably be signing up for the AMEX Premier Rewards Gold. At least in my own experience with AMEX, I have no recollection of having to put up with the same crap.

Morale of the story: Don't sign-up with Citi Thankyou unless you're willing to go through extra undocumented hoops to get your points.