Citibank PremierMiles enhances mileage earning from June 2013

I’ve been an ardent fan of the Citibank PremierMiles Credit Card. I believe its a secular mileage-earning credit card, and pays you a good amount of miles for your travel spends, specifically airline bookings, and I rate it high up there in my mileage earning CC 101. However, I’ve been disappointed a bit this past year, since they lost Jet Airways as a mileage transfer partner, and capped off the limit for mileage earning on tickets to Rs. 500,000 per annum, amongst other devaluations.

However, seems like some of these changes are out of the window, and there are some real ‘enhancements’ in the true sense of the word and not how rhetorically airlines/credit cards/loyalty programs use the term these days.

One of the key changes made is that Citibank has knocked off the Rs. 500,000 per annum limit for the credit card to get you 10 PremierMiles/Rs. 100. Although they say it is temporary and will be in effect till December 31, 2013, I’d imagine if it gets the kind of success that Citibank expects for this promotion, they might as well take the limit off for good (especially since the competition such as Jet Airways American Express Platinum CC, does offer unlimited miles).

The enhancement I was talking about, is that Citibank is now adding capabilities to the PremierMiles portal, which allow you to earn 10 PremierMiles/Rs. 100 spent even on the hotel reservations and car reservations you will make via the portal. In theory, this is not even an enhancement but a getting even move since Citi has gone on to add partners such as Yatra.com and GoIbibo.com which have the 10PM/Rs. 100 earning not just for flights, but for hotels and car bookings as well.

However, it seems like Citibank will be tweaking the backend to accommodate these changes, and as per them, the website will be down for maintenance as of 2nd-4th June 2013. The FAQ file is listed here, and is named “transition of service partner”, which kind of makes me believe that they are moving away from cleartrip.com as their backend, to maybe goibibo.com which supports redemptions at this moment on its own site as well.

All in all, good stuff coming our way and we should be happy about it!

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