Originally Posted by
yuryc
I'd stay out of Citi cards if possible.
- bad experience
- customer service ( as always YMMV )
- low reward points (TYP) IMHO or miles
- problematic (AA) miles redemption, devaluation
- if churning opportunity still exist, then why keep it.
Originally Posted by
Stubtify
I'll throw my hat in for the exact opposite with Citi. Both my wife and I got nice sized bonuses, and both of us got our AF waived without much trouble. We're on year 2 with the card, gaining between 1.2 and 2.2 miles per $, and have been able to use up gobs of the miles without trouble. Now they're offering 10% discount on redemption of miles as well.
While I don't have any big problem with AA redemption (and I don't see how it could be of lesser value than DL redemption!), and I don't consider the 100k AA miles I just got (from two 50k card apps) plus $300 credit plus some lounge passes to be low reward points, I do see
yuryc's pont about if churning is possible, why keep the card long term.
The only Citi card I have long term is an AT&T Universal Card, that I got long before I started traveling, and which I've kept simply because it has no annual fee and long credit history. The oldest of my Citi AA cards is a couple years, and those tend to cycle, as do my Citi Hilton HHonors cards (which can be churned even way faster than AA cards).
So from the standpoint of the original question of this thread, Citi may not be the best
for a long-term keeper card,
because their most valuable cards can be churned! (A card from another bank that can't be churned becomes more valuable to keep because of that, all else being equal.)
(Also, it remains to be seen whether it stays as easy to get full credit for every annual fee as a retention bonus now that they've added other benefits to the card. So I would count on the retention bonus offsetting the annual fee
longterm into future.)
So unless it's specifically AA miles that you want, Citi may not have much value
for "keeper" cards. As someone more interested in airline miles and hotel points than credit card specific points, I don't find TYP points nearly as interesting as UR points from Chase's no-annual-fee rotating-categories Freedom card. You can keep it for years, use it mostly for rotating categories, earn lots of UR points, then after years, get a Saphhire Preferred card for one year to all all those accumulated UR points to transfer to one of several airlines or hotel programs.
And for HHonors, the Citi Visa card stinks (tho not by as much a wide margin as before, now that benefits have just been upgrade), compared to the no-annual-fee AMEX. The only reason to keep the Citi HHonors Visa card (which can be churned "wildly") would be if you do a lot of purchases in places where Amex isn't accepted.