Originally Posted by
bocastephen
Trying to figure out my personal value proposition for this card, just received it today. My initial plan was to get the 100K bonus plus spend points, move the points to EVA and cancel, as so far, the value seems very limited...
1. Blacklane credits - I never use Blacklane, have no use for a car service in Southern California. Booked a car from TPE to Xinyi next month just to use the credit, but it's not something we would usually do
2. Priority Pass - useless, I have this with Amex
3. Precheck/GE fees - useless, I go through Nexus and am years away from renewal
4. Dining bonus points - rarely dine out
5. $300 hotel credit - requires 2 nights, and when I did a cursory check of upcoming hotel stays, the Citi Travel rates were almost double what I could book through other channels
6. AA lounge passes - useless, I have JAL OW Sapphire and go to the AA Flagship Lounge, or the Admirals Club if the FL isn't available
7. Splurge credit - $200 off my next AA flight
So basically from what I can tell, the only real value (for me) is the $200 splurge credit off an AA flight
Am I missing anything?
Definitely a case of YMMV. We each got a card. For the two cards, if we cancel both before the 1st anniversary, we will have paid total annual fees of $1190 and received credits prior to 12/31/25 totaling $1160 without having to go out of our way. In addition, we should be able to receive easy credits in 2026 of at least an additional $960 prior to our card anniversary. We also received 200,000 in TY points which we will transfer to AA. Finally, we obtained the ability to earn points in the TY point universe that can be transferred to AA (can now be done on less expensive cards and, depending on the numbers, we might downgrade to them in a year).
The hotels we were going to book anyway were each $10/night more expensive than the cheapest option, so I value the hotel credits at $280 each. (I have already found hotels for a trip next year with the same pricing.) The AA splurge was easy and should be next year too. This year the cars worked very well for us; next year the cars may not, so I added no value for them for 2026.
For you, even with only being able to use the splurge credit, if you keep the card for a year, you've got $400 in splurge credits plus the sign up bonus (1/2 a cent a point?) to offset an annual fee of $595. I don't know how Citi can keep doing that.