faciar

My google search turned up the following contract language for Citi TYN Terms and Conditions:

"Redemption of ThankYou Points received for Products and Services (i.e., other than those awarded for Card Usage) may result in your receipt of taxable income from Citibank in the tax year in which the ThankYou Points are redeemed. In accordance with U.S. tax law, Citibank may
be required to send to you and file with the IRS a Form 1099-MISC (Miscellaneous Income) for the year in which a reward is issued to you. The valuation of ThankYou Point redemptions for Form 1099-MISC tax reporting purposes will be at Citibank�s sole discretion. You are solely responsible
for any personal tax liability arising out of the redemption of ThankYou Points. Please consult with your Tax Advisor if you should have any questions regarding your personal tax situation"

Happy

There is NOTHING NEW regarding the 1099MISC. It has been reported since TYPs were introduced and earnings became possible thru banking products like from 2006.

In fact see posts 1760 to 1763 just a few above yours - someone just received his 1099 for the Feb 2009 redemption and I explained to him how Citi determined the value.

It has nothing to do with Citi - it is US Tax Laws - all bonuses earned thru banking products if redemption value can be established, the value received is considered taxable ordinary income.

Citi and any other banks, are REQUIRED to comply with the Tax Law.

Miles on the other hand, is NOT taxable because IRS has ruled that the value of miles cannot be reasonably established.

BTW, when talking about matters related to finance, credit cards, exchange rates, etc etc, I have found posters on Cruise Critic boards tend to be fairly lack of knowledge. But that is understandable.

gregorygrady

Because I booked the ticket for a relative (I don't know their MP#), and later ended up needing to cancel it.

bostonbali

Hope you can avoid having to go through the nightmare I'm currently in the middle of.

Last night, I purchased 2 sub-$500 tickets for Mrs. Bostonbali and I.
As method of payment, I was using an eCredit for each of us.

Each of us had eCredits from previously-cancelled TYP-purchased itineraries. These itineraries included non-refundable segments, so those tickets were non-refundable (most restrictive rule applies).

Well, to my horror, instead of seeing new eTicket numbers for the $2,500ish balance remaining on our eTickets (each of us started with $3,000ish eTicket credit, and used that eCredit to pay for the sub-$500 ticket), I saw that the credit was REFUNDED TO CREDIT CARD!!!

I immediately contacted DL, who put me in touch with their Refunds department. Long story short, after a 90+ minute conversation, the agent (who was very helpful and sympathetic, by the way) stated they can't figure out how to get this transaction undone.

They're still working on it, but as of right now, we're out $5K (2 x $2,500 missing eCredits) on these two eCredits alone.

Not to get everyone confused, but I also cancelled another rez earlier in the week and discovered that instead of going back to an eTicket, the refund went to the original credit card used to purchase the ticket...

Moral of the story - the game has changed - don't automatically expect/assume you'll get a new eTicket number for any residual value.

What a mess - hope I didn't lose this money!!!

friedablass

My sympathies are with you, bostonbali . It seems you are in quite deep and I hope you can get DL to issue you a new e-ticket instead of the credit card refund.

My understanding of this whole issue was that if you "purchased" a non-refundable fare with TYPs and then cancelled and rebooked that fare, you would get a credit for the residual amount. That credit should no longer be hooked to TYN's CC since that was only in the picture for the original purchase of the first reservation.

At one point I was thinking that it wasn't so smart of me to bank most of my travel vouchers with CO, but now I see that their credits are the simplest to use and carry the least or no risk of going back to the original form of payment. Once I was successful in having an electronic voucher issued (rebooking the original fare and getting the voucher for the residual value), I was able to use the PIN number on the voucher to pay for fares until that voucher was depleted. For example, the voucher started out with $2k and I purchased a fare for $1100, so there was $900 left on that voucher. The next time I purchased a fare I used the same PIN and the $900 was applied to that fare. I didn't need to worry that after the first $1100 purchase, something funny could happen to the remaining $900.

I sincerely hope that you will not be out $5000 over this and you'll be able to get your e-credits from DL. If it's any consolation, you can always call TYN and they do usually credit you back the points used to purchase tickets that are then cancelled - you tell them the ticket was cancelled and refunded back to their CC and they should give you your points back. I know the value of the points won't be anywhere close to what they were worth when redeeming for fixed flights, but it's better than nothing...

bostonbali

Thanks friedablass - appreciate your comments!

The CO process you describe is how DL used to do it - after converting a ticket to an eTicket, it could be depleted down and any remaining value was issued via a new eTicket.

Something changed in the recent past - likely due to the integration/IT issues.

At the moment, DL admits the money should not have gone back to the credit card, but is telling me to contact them for the money... Not giving up yet - it's their mistake, they need to find a way to correct the issue.

Bostonbali

Happy

I am really confused by the terms here - Are you saying there should be a new eTicket worth the new e-Credit balance of $2,500?

The term of e-Ticket to me is a ticket with an itinerary. The term of e-Credit is simply a cert / voucher with value.

Since DL has acknowledged they made a mistake, hopefully you would be able to resolve this with them. Else you would still get your points refunded pro-rated with a process. It is a nightmare though.

bostonbali

I'm sorry - I used the words eTicket and eCredit interchangeably.

After using roughly $500 out of my original $3K eCredit, I was looking for the remaining balance, roughly $2,500, to be issued in the form of a new eCredit - does that help?

Still working on it from DL's side. Seems that their answer is that I should get the credit from my credit card company - nevermind the fact that they issued a refund on a non-refundable ticket.

Not that I want to go there yet, but TYP will issue a pro-rated refund of points? I wasn't aware...

Happy

No, you will not get credit from your CC company. You need to stress the fact that the tickets were NOT paid by your CC.

Go back to the Feb / March 2009 period of this thread - there were more than one case that the credit went back to TYN. There was a case happened really early when the redemption was still going on in full force. The person had that happened has posted the process and phone number and the inner working of how TYN handling the refund of points. You need to go back to those pages to find the answers on how to go about it.

As far as I remember, TYN first has to verify they indeed get the refund to their CC. Then they would process the partial refund of points. Of course now the pts would worth only 1 cent per pt - but that is still better than you get nothing back.

Bikeguy

But TYP bought him a $3K ticket, and is only getting back $2500. I agree if they got back the whole amount, he'd get his points back. Does he get back 5/6th now?

I have a few left, and am afraid to use them.

I have a fully refundable ticket from before the deval that I have been keeping alive for over two years, by getting more expensive fully refundable tickets. I was waiting for the switch from NW to DL, because DLs rules are much less restrictive. At one point, a know it all agent insisted a refund be given. I asked where the money would go, After an hour of research, they knew which cards had been charged which amounts and would not give the money back to the latest card, but back to each card in the amount used by each card. The vast majority would have gone back the TYP. I said the original card was closed, but they said that's where the refund would go and the bank would write me a check.

I hung up and called again and it's still alive.

bostonbali, I feel your pain.

friedablass

It happened to me - I had part of a fare (that I thought was non-refundable) go back to TYN and they refunded the points after verifying the refund. It was still before the deadline of the termination fixed flight points redemptions, so I was able to quickly book another fare (making 100% sure it was non-refundable). However, in the interim TYN had changed the Business Class redemption level from 3 cpp to 2 cpp so I did lose some of the value, but it was still better than the current redemption level of 1 cpp.

So, bostonbali should be able to get back 25000 TYPs if the $2500 was indeed refunded to Citi's CC.

Happy

TYN would give a Pro-rated refund on the points at least that was how they did it when such things happened last year. It was a very manual process involving spreadsheet kept by a VP at TYN, believe it or not, per the first poster who had to go thru the whole process.

As for your refundable ticket - you may be better off to bite the bullet to book a NON-refundable ticket with slightly higher value. When you are ready to travel then cancel the now NON-refundable ticket, pay the ticket change fee, and get back a residual value voucher. Of course you must time this well, in particularly the Non-refundable ticket must be canceled before departure date to retain its value.

Happy

The value is only used in the % of usage calculation. So he would not get back 250,000 pts for $2,500 refund. It depends on how much % of the $2500 refund is, based on the original redemption value. He would then get back the same % of the TYPs redeemed before.

A quick and dirty way to come up an approximate number of points to be refunded is just use either 2c or 3c per pt.

Because at 2c per pt redemption, $2500 would be 125,000 pts only. If his original redemption value was 3c per pt, he would get back even LESS.

friedablass

You are right about that - I was thinking he'll get 1 cpp refund based on the $ amount refund. I think in my case $1500 was refunded which was 25% of a 200k redemption (ticket value of $6000), so I got back 50k points and used it along with other banked TYPs to redeem at the 2 cpp level.

So, depending on what $ percentage the $2500 was of the original $ redemption value and the amount of points used for the redemption, he should get back that percentage of points.

Bikeguy

That's the plan.

I was originally thinking the problem would be finding a nonrefundable non-intl (which a lot of times forces the residual value to be used on the same routing) fare for over $7K, but a friend pointed out I can combine fare classes and get a full Y NRT-DTW, with a nonrefundable DTW-CHI tacked on, forcing the fare to be nonrefundable.

A high class problem to have, really.