Last week I reviewed the American Express Gold Charge Card for you all. This week, it is the turn of looking at the other card which has a place of pride in my wallet and gets a lot of my spend: Citibank Premier Miles Credit Card.

I picked up this card in December 2011, when the benefits on the Citibank Jet Airways Platinum Credit Card were downgraded, and I must say I am very happy with it so far.

Sign-up bonus: You get 2 ‘complimentary’ ticket codes which allow you to book domestic flight segments at least 15 days ahead of travel on any airline in India. These codes have to be used via the PremierMiles portal and you get a base fare waiver of upto INR 1500 per ticket on your bookings.

Fee: Free for the first year, INR 5,000 plus taxes on renewal (you get 5,000 Premier Miles bonus in your account on renewal). The other option is to allow them to deduct 5,000 Premier Miles from your account for the annual fee.

Eligibility: Not publicly disclosed

Features: This is one of the best ‘secular’ earning and burning travel credit cards I’ve seen in India. Since the world is moving to a chip-card, this one is a chip card as well. However, that could lead you to an embarrassing situation sometimes when you use it in India, since quite a few points of acceptance I know don’t know how to handle a ‘chip’ card! Sigh! They tell me it is declined and I wonder how could that happen, since my credit limit is usually only 30-40% utilised at any point of time.

The PM (Premier Miles) card comes with access to the PremierMiles portal like I mentioned above, which is a full-blown travel portal run exclusively for PM customers at Citibank. You can make your hotel and ticket bookings using this portal, and earn 10 PremierMiles/INR 100 spent. In a lot of cases, I’ve noticed the pricing is competitive but I always check the airlines own website and an established online travel agent to see what gives the best deal before booking. Sometimes the difference is minor enough to overlook since I’d get 10 PMs/INR 100 here v/s the 2.5 PM/INR 100 I’d earn with booking on an online travel agent.

Apart from the travel booking capability, you also get in hand a few specific tie-ups which could be of help. There are hotel-tieups which allow you buy-one get-one free offers currently valid at the Fortune hotels. The tie-up with Carzonrent offer a free upgrade on booking your car with them.

Since this card is issued as a MasterCard in India, you also get complimentary access to lounges across 6 cities in India where Clipper and Plaza Premium operate lounges. Also, you get a basic $99 PriorityPass complimentary, which allows access to airports around the globe @ $27 per person per visit.

The telephone helpline is very helpful, and you get directed to the CitiGold service when you call the appointed number. This means less waiting and more helpful agents. On the one and only occasion I have had to call, the agent was very helpful in doing some housekeeping on the card which I had forgotten about altogether.

Premier Miles: The reason I love this card, is quite simply the mileage earning capability it brings. Like I had mentioned in an earlier post, you can transfer your Premier Miles into 6 frequent flyer programs, which include Jet Airways, Air India, Kingfisher Airlines, Thai Airways, Singapore Airlines and Cathay Pacific. The awesome part is, the 1:1 conversion ratio. Of you can burn them on the PremierMiles portal with flight bookings or hotels. The Premier Miles never expire.

Earning Premier Miles: If you are a self-directed traveller, this one is for you. On your travel bookings with any airline across the world, if made directly with the airline (website/reservation office), you get 10 PM/INR 100 spent, and the same is the case if you book the ticket with the PM portal. If you book via another travel agent or online service such as Cleartrip, MakeMyTrip etc. you get 2.5PM/INR 100 spent. This is the same as using the card for other non-travel spends. I wish they added hotels to the 10PM/INR 100 list and I’d happily swipe it away on my hotel payments as well. But even otherwise, this is a card which allows me to earn miles for almost every little purchase I can make.

Burning Premier Miles: Like I mentioned earlier, Citibank offers the potential to transfer PMs as mileage currency to 6 frequent flyer programs at a 1:1 ratio. This is way better than most other cards in the market today. The Amex I reviewed last week, offers 1 JP Mile for 1.6 MR points, for instance. Also, I can transfer these miles to whichever program at short notice. For instance, I will transfer a huge stash shortly to JetPrivilege to benefit from the on-going 25% bonus offer.

Besides airline transfers, the Premier Miles portal also has the ability to book you tickets on any domestic/international route. For domestic redemptions, the burn rates are published and are in line with most airline burn ratios. So, DEL-BOM is offered at 10,500 PM via the portal on any full-service airline. Also, you get a reward redemption with the potential to earn miles on the ticket. Premier Miles bookings are essentially burning your points to buy revenue tickets with the airline. But the proposition becomes more attractive because you don’t have 1-2 seats per flight allocated for awards, but as many as your points can buy.

On the international side, however, the burn ratios are very unattractive and hence something I would avoid. Since they are ‘buying’ tickets, they don’t book into award classes, and the miles fluctuate all the time. There is no published award chart. So, for instance, if you wanted to book BOM-SIN, which Jet Airways prices at 20,000 JP Miles plus surcharge/taxes in Y, here, you get a different rate altogether.

However, I have to give it to them that you have the ability to pay for fuel surcharge in terms of miles rather than actual cash. However, I will choose to avoid this till the time things get better in terms of international redemptions.

Free Flight Coupons: Like I mentioned earlier, you get 2 free flight vouchers to start with when you accept the card. Citibank PM will also send you upto 3 more vouchers in a year every time you spend INR 1,00,000 on the card. For a frequent traveller, that means INR 7,500 worth of ticket value in year one, and INR 4,500 worth of ticket value on an ongoing basis. And Citibank PM proactively looks at these base fares. When they offered me the card, ticket prices were not so high, so these vouchers were good for INR 1,200 per flight and they revised it upwards on their own initiative.

Overall assessment:

If you travel frequently, you definitely should be getting this card purely for the value of the miles you get to earn via your travel bookings. With the first year free, you could always try it out and cancel if it does not work to your satisfaction. This one is one of my personal favourites.

Related Posts:

• Sunday Plastic: The American Express Gold Charge Card
• The Citibank Premier Miles Credit Card: It Works!
• Finally, a credit card which earns me lots of miles in India!

Disclosure: This post is not at the initiative of Citibank or their associates and I am not earning any fees to write this piece. It is purely my own opinion about the card and its utility.

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I’ve been planning to start a review of all the travel credit cards in India for a while now, but various things have kept me busy to be able to commit some time to this. But, it is a go now and I hope to update it as frequently as possible. I will start the series with The American Express Gold Charge Card this week. I got this card when the benefits on the Kingfisher First American Express card were modified.

American Express revamped the Gold Charge Card in 2011, and made it one of the most competitive charge card products in the Indian market. Except for people who get their company-sponsored American Express cards way back, people usually did not know of the ‘Charge Card’ concept around India much.

Sign-up bonus: None.

Fee: Free for the first year, INR 4,500 plus taxes on renewal (5,000 MR points bonus on renewal which almost pays for the fee).

Eligibility: A minimum gross annual income of INR 8,00,000.

Features: This is not a travel credit card actually, but a great card for everyone who cares to put their spends on plastic rather than cash and debit cards. No rollovers allowed since you will pay up everything at the end of the month. One of the reasons I love the American Express Gold card is the fantastic level of service you receive as a cardholder. Yes, you are not Platinum, but the service is great and prompt. I’ve had a couple of times when bonuses did not credit to my account in time, and a simple call would help you get your points credited instantaneously.

You got to remember this is a charge card, so no pre-set spending limits. But that does not mean you’re going to go out and buy that six-figure jewellery set on day one and be approved the charge. Your spend and repayment history will gradually dictate how your charges will be approved.

Another particular feature I like a lot is the Online Fraud Protection Guarantee. This being the only charge card I carry around, I use it all the time for online purchases as well. And sometimes, those details can be reaching the wrong hands (unintentionally!). I personally experienced this Fraud Protection Guarantee a few months back.

Read More…

Last December I’d written about how I was mighty pissed about the Jet Airways Citibank Credit Card, since they key benefits were devalued. The upgrade vouchers were drying up and that was a key reason for me to keep the card.

Keeping that in mind, I’d switched to the Citibank Premier Miles Credit Card, which enabled a more ‘secular’ earning and burning I felt. I could earn 10 PMs per INR 100 for airline-related spend made directly with the airline or via a special portal called premiermiles.co.in. This is still better than earning 8 JPMiles per INR 100 for booking tickets only on Jet Airways, since I get 10 JP Miles if I chose to!

On top of that, I got 2 complimentary ticket codes, which allowed me an up to INR 1500 waiver on base fares on domestic tickets booked via the PremierMiles website. Additionally, for every INR 1,00,000 (USD 2,000) I spent, I could earn 1 more base fare complimentary ticket code (uptil 3!).

So I went about booking a lot of my airfare with this card, earning those 10x PM miles for every time I was flying (the Oneworld MegaDo, the trip to India Aviation, and work trips etc.!) and earned a neat stash of miles. Recently, Jet Airways announced a promotion where they were offering a 25% bonus on converting your credit card points/miles to JPMiles. While finding redemptions with JetPrivilege is a pain these days, given my options to transfer (Air India, Jet Airways, Kingfisher (!?), Thai Airways, Singapore Airlines and Cathay Pacific), I only thought it to be useful to convert the Citi PMs to JP Miles since it is still my primary mileage program and I could use these miles at will (book domestic for 20% mileage rates off, anyone?).

The Premier Miles Terms & Conditions stated it could take up to 3 weeks to convert these points to miles, so I thought it would be the right thing to do to make a test transaction to see how much time it takes. That ways, I could factor in when to push the buttons. I gave Citibank a call on Wednesday evening (May 2nd), and yesterday afternoon I had the transaction credit to my account! So, now I know I have all of month to earn more PMs before I can make up my mind about how many to transfer!

This is a wonderful offer, and too bad it comes once every two years, so do make use of it to convert your credit card miles and points into Jet currency if you please. Domestic tickets are no problem to find, however, it will take a while to get hold of international reward tickets.

Next up, I wanted to see how the complimentary ticket codes worked. So I went up to the PremierMiles portal and plonked the details of the tickets I needed. I booked a ticket from Goa to Mumbai (I’ll be doing the Mumbai Goa leg by train ) and it worked quite well. I had 5-6 options to choose, and eventually I got a ticket in two minutes flat!

So now that I everything works, I am going to go ahead and put a lot more of my charges on this card. A full review coming up later, but I sure love this card!

Related Posts:

• Finally, a credit card which earns me lots of miles in India!
• Jet Airways Citibank Credit Cards devalue upgrade benefits with effect from September 2011
• Bye Bye Citibank Jet Airways Platinum Credit Card!
• Jet Airways offers 25% bonus on credit card conversions to miles till 31st May 2012

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