Citibank is devaluing points transfers to two of their partners effective April 19, 2026. Premium ThankYou Rewards cards will see a worse transfer rate to Choice Privileges and to Preferred Hotels I Prefer starting at that time.
- Currently 1,000 ThankYou Rewards Points transfer to 2,000 Choice Privileges points. Effective April 19, that rate will be cut by 25% to 1,500 Choice Privileges points.
- Currently 1,000 ThankYou Rewards points transfer to 4,000 Preferred Hotels I Prefer points. Effective April 19, that rate will be cut by 50% to 2,000 I Prefer points.
Ironically, Citibank emails to cardmembers sharing this change close, “A little ThankYou… can go a long way.”
These are somewhat niche partners, but Preferred Hotels offered real value at the old 1:4 ratio, giving you 2-3 cents per Citibank point. It’s hard to imagine there will be many opportunities for transferring Citibank points to Preferred Hotels at reasonable value with this change. Meanwhile, I value Choice points at perhaps half a cent apiece. I wouldn’t transfer at the old rate. This new rate makes them a non-partner in my calculations.
Here’s Citi’s transfer partners.
- oneworld: American Airlines AAdvantage, Cathay Pacific Asia Miles, Malaysia Airlines Enrich, Qantas Frequent Flyer, Qatar Airways Privilege Club
- Star Alliance: Avianca LifeMiles, EVA Air Infinity MileageLands, Singapore Airlines KrisFlyer, Thai Airways Royal Orchid Plus, Turkish Airlines Miles & Smiles
- SkyTeam: Aeromexico Club Premier, Air France KLM Flying Blue, Virgin Atlantic Flying Club
- Non-alliance: Emirates Skywards, Etihad Guest, JetBlue TrueBlue
- Hotels: Leading Hotels of the World Leaders Club, Accor ALL – Accor Live Limitless, Choice Hotels Choice Privileges, Preferred Hotels I Prefer, Wyndham Hotels Wyndham Rewards
There’s value in American AAdvantage, Cathay Pacific, Qantas, and Qatar (which can further transfer to other Avios programs like British Airways and Finnair). There’s value in LifeMiles, EVA Air, Singapore, Air France KLM Flying Blue and even Virgin Atlantic.
I view Malaysia airlines, THAI, Aeromexico and Turkish largely just running up the score on having partners at this point. Turkish used to offer strong value but they’ve largely eliminated those opportunities.
EVA Air is a real sleeper by the way because they offer better availability to their own members than to partners. It’s actually possible to get business class awards, say, from Seattle to Asia via Taipei using Infinity MileageLands points while doing so with United or Air Canada miles is rare.
Turkish had value when they ran a 50% bonus on transfers from Citi lat fall. The fuel surcharges are very high although not as bad as BA.
Other than that, yeah very little value.
Honestly, I can understand credit card fatigue at this point. We’re seeing one, if not several, devaluations a week from some bank or loyalty program at this point, and finding the “sweet spots” is getting more and more cumbersome. What good is “80K points to Japan in JAL first class” if it’s only available for one seat on one flight every other year, has to be booked 11 months out, and sells out 5 minutes after becoming available?
While I like the flexibility of a credit card loyalty program, the points game is becoming less and less lucrative to play, and more and more exhausting, especially with regards to aspirational redemptions. Unless you’re totally committed, this is becoming not worth it for more and more people. It’s hard to get outsized value now.
That really hurts. This was my preferred way to redeem ThankYouPoints, and this is also the primary program I was operating in. Banks getting in on devaluations are just driving the value of participating in these programs to “juice isn’t worth the squeeze.”
Gonna take a wager out of the dark and guess that the Choice one has to do with Wells’s issuer relationship with Choice. Citi and Choice likely had some sort of preferential contract predating Wells’s introduction of transferable points. Choice’s agreement with Wells likely included some kind of exclusivity/preferential treatment, hence the downgrade. Iprefer’s recent inclusion into the C1 ecosystem may similarly impact Citi’s turf.
The 1:4 ratio for Preferred Hotels was too good to last. There was great value to be had at times. I have had redemptions as high as 4 cpp at The Emblem in Prague, although the average is closer to 2 cpp. It’s a very quirky program that isn’t easy to use. Properties available on points only redemptions seem to come and go on a daily basis and don’t always line up with Preferred Hotels available through Choice. For most points only redemptions still available through iPrefer I expect the cpp will drop to one cent per TYP rendering this partner useless to anyone doing the math. At least they provided a month’s notice to take advantage of the old transfer rate, but I also would not take the risk of a speculative transfer because of the aforementioned quirks. Wells > Choice > Preferred Hotels is now the better path, but that also comes with its own challenges.
iprefer footprint is <700 properties with ~250 presently bookable on points. Closer to 450 in near future based on site tech. 2.0cpp min redemption.
Choice points are worth at minimum 0.6cpp but I won't redeem for less than 0.8cpp. I find solid deals in big European cities.
Disaster. The Preferred Hotel link was one of the highest-value secrets of the Citi family.
@Gary: One point: Your Choice point valuation should be 0.75c. Frequent Miler obtained a million-datapoint database from Gondola that established that. It is conclusive.
“Thanks to them, we now have access to results from ~980,000 domestic and international Choice Privileges award searches across almost 5,000 properties,”
https://frequentmiler.com/what-are-choice-points-worth/
They are still a non-partner, unfortunately.
“While I like the flexibility of a credit card loyalty program, the points game is becoming less and less lucrative to play, and more and more exhausting, especially with regards to aspirational redemptions. Unless you’re totally committed, this is becoming not worth it for more and more people. It’s hard to get outsized value now.”
Totally correct, and it would have been at any time in the last quarter century. Other than spending, not hoarding, points the best defense is – use Bilt for everything. See Gary’s articles on his adventures with this
Air Canada the best
@L3 – there’s a difference between ‘how much travel a point buys’ and ‘how much travel a point is worth.’ I’ve walked through this extensively in several posts. Points that can only be used for travel aren’t worth as much as cash that can buy anything. Points where there’s more devaluation risk than a dollar need to be discounted as well. And points that you aren’t going to spend right away, and don’t earn a rate of return in the meantime, need to be discounted for time too. So you take a point that buys 3/4ths of a cent on average against *what you really would have spent on the room* (would you have booked that room for cash at that price) still needs to be reduced by several factors to get the actual cash value of that point.
Wells Fargo still transfers to Choice at 1:2 which I think is a decent redemption for their points
The various transferable bank loyalty programs are under the following kind of twin pressure which is getting more and more intense:
1) the seller of airline and hotel loyalty program points want higher revenue and higher margins from selling points to partners and thus are pushing for higher prices per point sold to the bank programs; and
2) the banks and bank loyalty programs want to boost their own profit margins and want to make the consumers’ redemptions of bank loyalty program points more profitable for the bank/bank loyalty program itself.
This is why consumers are seeing worsening transfer ratios plus cash-equivalent uses being curtailed when it comes to bank program point redemptions.
@Gary: The Gondola database is approximately one million transactions that compare essentially the point price and the cash price of the room on a given date. I have not heard of anything more definitive. You can cut and dice it for special guest categories (AARP, Govt., etc.) but unless these are systematically relevant this transaction data is it.
@L3 – I wrote a post explaining this in greater detail. I am good with ‘here’s how much travel you can buy with these points’ but that is very different than ‘here’s how much these points are worth’.
Reducing transfer ratios, changes to programs with limited notice, massive devaluations, with hardly any recourse. These programs should be better regulated, because right now it’s the ‘wild west’ and if you think you as a consumer are benefiting… not for long.