ZapperO

So I know that paying for taxes and fees on Citi ThankYou Point fixed reward flight redemptions no longer gives you flight points but do in-flight purchases (such as drinks, food, movies) still do the trick to get flight points for the entire number of miles flown?

I'd be curious to know if anyone can offer success stories on specific airlines...such as American, Delta, Jetblue, and United. Stories about other airlines are also more than welcome, it is just that I'm flying each of those airlines listed at least once in the next month and would love to get flight points for the trips as I have the 25,000 bonus points for opening the PP Elite account and I have not matched them with 25,000 flight points yet.

Thanks!

somdave2005

I can't comment on inflight purchases counting as a "flight." but I just wanted to respond to your last sentence on matching your bonus points. You don't have to match your 25K opening bonus points...they're yours to spend right away. It's your subsequent flight points you earn that you will have to match with spending.

ZapperO

Thanks for the reply! I appreciate the insight on my 25k opening bonus points being usable right away. I am aware of that, but it seems like I'm leaving ANOTHER 25k free points on the table by not matching the 25k bonus points with 25k flight points which I believe would automatically convert to ThankYou points and be transferred into my account. Does this sound right?

mia

You do not need to keep the Bonus points in your ThankYou account to use them to match Flight points. Your "entitlement" to match 25,000 Flight points will persist and they should post to ThankYou network automatically, though it's always worthwhile keeping track.

The most efficient way I know to earn Flight points is to use the card to pay the taxes and fees on an award ticket obtained by redeeming airline miles.

ZapperO

Great tip on using the card to earn flight points on award tickets booked directly with the airlines. I actually have an upcoming award trip to Europe on Lufthansa that I plan too book soon and doing this would be perfect!

Are there other ideas floating around out there?

Astriker

Keep in mind that your flight points transferred over to your account cannot exceed your purchase points. This changed in the last 12 months, as it used to be no limit.

If I buy a ticket for $200 for fees, then fly 12,000 miles on my ticket, I have to spend $12,000 on my credit card when the ticket hits, or I only get what I spent. If the $200 is the most I spent by chance, you would receive 200 flight points and 200 spend points.

This was not the policy before, I had gone to Europe before and booked my family tickets, and I received all the points and there is no way I spent 30,000 in the month.

GUWonder

Buying an expensive refundable ticket to hit the desired spending level and then -- after the points post -- refunding the ticket and closing the account doesn't still work?

sy7

I posted this elsewhere, but I figure I might as well repeat this since it seems a lot of people don't realize how easy it is to get flight points for free.

Citi tracks flight points by the e-ticket number; if a refund to that e-ticket number posts before the date of the flight, you won't get the flight points for that ticket. However, if you have changed the flight so the e-ticket number is reissued, the original ticketed flights will still post.

A quick and easy way to obtain flight points for your PremierPass cards with little outlay is to make Southwest ticket purchases. Make sure to select a senior fare--these are fully refundable. Purchase a straightforward round-trip (eg OAK-FLL) with minimal stops (~$400). Change the ticket by adding stops, switching connection cities, etc. You can get more than six different $1-3 charges (each one counts as a separate ticket) by doing this. Each charge is associated with a new ticket number, and will give you the full flight mileage credit (even if the dates remain the same). I usually wait a few hours or a day between each $1-2 charge, just in case. Once you have sufficient flights, you can then request a refund from Southwest. Apparently this is a manual process and might take a while. I've never actually done this, since I've used the funds for other flights, but I did notice that it is an option when you are canceling a fully refundable senior ticket.

Of course, you can also do the same thing with refundable tickets from other airlines, but their airfares tend to be a lot more expensive. Plus, it is really easy to change a Southwest ticket on their website and just charge $1-2 per "new" ticket.

Another way of accomplishing this is to charge the taxes for an award ticket on your card, change the flights slightly (and get new ticket numbers and new tax charged) and then cancel. That only works though if you have fee-free redeposit for the award. I personally found it simpler to go the Southwest route, especially since I had lots of sign-up bonus points to match.

If you have a credit on your Citi card, you can call them up and request them to send you a check for the balance, if you don't want to put any additional spend on the card.

sy7

I think what happened was that you got your credit card sign-up bonus (which count as "purchase" points) matched with flight points. As far as I know, flight points only ever posted if they were matched with purchase points.

Happy

It has ALWAYS been the case that the flight pts cannot be more than the purchase points. However, the signup bonus is treated as purchase points. Therefore, there is that 25K "purchase pts" right there, ready to match the flight pts.

You probably forgot the portion of bonus points - that most like was HOW your 30K flight pts got posted.

Unfortunately, while you have the flight pts matched and posted - the refund of the ticket would essentially created a negative entry on the card, and you get equal amount of DEDUCTION of your TYPs.

Furthermore, the new rules effective -3/01 - closing your card would also CANCEL any TYP balance derived from that card. There are even rules about Citi can FREEZE your TYN account and it would charge you to unfreeze your TYN account.

New Rules have been out as part of the statement, you should have received it unless your statement date happens to be last week of the month - then you probably be among the last batch to be notified, officially.

Personally I expect to see new threads spring up in coming months about how they lose their TYPs or their TYN accounts are closed by Citi.... And I would say TOUGH, because the new rules are very clear.

gv111

Can you please elaborate which rules are you referring to? I have several premier pass cards with closing dates in first week of Feb. They do not have any such information. I have online statements only if it matters.

Happy

If you have paperless statement, the rules are in the announcement section online.

If you have paper statement, the rules are on the 2nd page of the paper statement.

Someone has posted the rules directly lifted from his online statement. A 2nd poster also posted the same thing. That was late January before the 2nd devaluation.

I have paper statements only and am not going to type the whole thing here.

You can do a search on this forum and should be able to find the several posts with all the rules posted.

friedablass

Just an FYI, you can download past statements (I don't remember for how many months back) in PDF format after logging into your account online. I'm assuming you can then copy/paste any information, so that's how that poster posted the new T&Cs.

Happy

Thanks for the reminder. I totally forgot about the PDF download. Normally I only read the unbilled activity online.

I definitely read about someone said the new rules are in the Announcement section of his online statement.

More than a few posters also commented about this essentially put churning TYP cards to an end.

gv111

I looked in my online statements and also searched on these forums. I could not find any detailed information on full new TC. The only thing I found was Happy's related post on thread "What exactly is going on with Citi\ThankYou credit cards". If you can point me to the post containing full TC, it will be very helpful. Alternatively if your online statement contains full TC, you can also copy the TC and PM/email me. That information is very relevant for me. Thanks so much.