Citibank increases minimum points/miles redemption to 10,000

Citibank is revising the T&C of their rewards program effective 30 March 2017 to increase the minimum number of points that need to be transferred. The screen capture below says it all really.

I’ve got mixed feelings about Citibank. They don’t pool your points together (people have reported getting CSOs to combine ThankYou points from different cards but have been less successful getting ThankYou points combined with Premiermiles) which means you need to pay two redemption fees to redeem points from two different cards.

However, they made up for that a little bit with their flexibility. You could transfer a minimum of 500 miles/points to an airline frequent flyer program, making it a great rewards program to use if you just needed to top up your account a little bit but wanted to put the rest of your miles elsewhere (and didn’t mind paying a one time S$25 fee for that privilege)

Now that the minimum transfer amount is 10,000 miles, you lose that nimbleness. That said, Citibank does have some of the most useful partners of any Singapore bank. In addition to the usual Asia Miles and Krisflyer, you can transfer to Thai, Delta, MAS, BA, Etihad, EVA and of course, everyone’s favourite Indonesian airline Garuda.

With this change, the minimum cashout amounts by bank are as follows

• DBS- 10,000 miles
• UOB- 10,000 miles
• Citibank- 10,000 miles
• HSBC- 2,000 miles
• ANZ- 2,000 (Asiamiles), 5,000 (Krisflyer)
• OCBC- 10,000 miles
• Maybank- 2,000 miles

I’m generally ambivalent about minimum transfer amounts and transfer fees because I’m in the habit of cashing out a large chunk at one go, which makes the fees more of a rounding error in the grand scheme of things. But it does seem that banks are moving towards less flexibility (see DBS’s switch from an unlimited transfer model to a per transfer model)