I recently did a review of the so-called “$120K credit cards” in Singapore, which are targeted at the entry level prestige segment of the market. The conclusion I reached was that if I had to pick one, I’d probably go with the Citi Prestige, due to its unlimited lounge access, generous limo policy and fourth night free benefit.
If you’ve been thinking about getting a Prestige card but haven’t pulled the trigger yet, you might be interested to know that from now till 30 November 2017, Citibank is offering a sign up bonus on its Prestige card which allows you to earn the equivalent of 80,000 miles when you spend $20,000 in the first 3 months and pay the $535 annual fee.
The breakdown of the 80,000 miles (creditied in the form of 200,000 Citi dollars…if only this TK deal were still around) is
- 25,000 miles welcome gift (with the $535 annual fee)
- 26,000 base miles ($20K spending @ 1.3 mpd for local*)
- 29,000 miles bonus for hitting $20K threshold
*Note that the workings in Citibank’s example assume that your $20,000 is spent locally. On the other extreme if you spent all of that overseas, you’d end up with 94,000 miles instead of 80,000 miles. In reality, you can expect to hit something in between those two figures.
$20,000 in 3 months is certainly a lot of money, and unless you’ve got a big ticket life event coming up it’s certainly going to be very hard to hit that sum. The good news is that it’s confirmed that spending with Cardup will count towards the minimum spend, so if you have big rental bills or tax payments then this could potentially help you hit the threshold.
I tried going through the HWZ thread to see if I could find any past sign up offers to see how this one compares, but couldn’t find anything of note in the past 12 months. Still, if you’re thinking about getting the card, you should have a read of that thread because people post about some of the unpublished benefits that Citibank sends out from time to time (eg special dinner packages, priority access to shows etc) to Prestige cardholders.
The T&C can be found here. I didn’t find anything to be worried about, but note that you can’t take part in this promotion if you cancelled your Citi Prestige card within the last 6 months and reapply.
Sign up for the 29,000 mile Citi Prestige bonus offer here (I earn a referral bonus)
One last point about Citibank cards. Remember that Thank You points do not pool across cards. That is, you will not be able to combine the points you earn from your Citibank Rewards card with your Prestige card, nor your Premiermiles card with your Prestige card. This means paying multiple conversion fees when you want to cash out. Needless to say I find this extremely infuriating and customer unfriendly, but those are the rules. Citibank somewhat makes up for it by having a much wider range of transfer partners than other banks, but still…
