March Easter Island Point Update: Earning and Using Citi ThankYou Points
I previously wrote about our goal for the month of March to earn enough points for a trip to my dream destination: Easter Island! The first week, I focused a main target that is going to help us cover a large portion of our hotel costs and incidental expenses on the trip: Citi ThankYou points. We’ll be using these to order Hyatt gift checks to pay for our hotel in Buenos Aires as well as incidentals and we may dip into these to cover our hotel in Easter Island.
We will be starting our trip in Buenos Aires, Argentina and spending six nights at Palacio Duhau Park Hyatt Buenos Aires. Svetlana will be arriving first as she is an avid tango dancer, a popular cultural pastime in Buenos Aires. Natalya and I will be joining her and also spending four nights each in Buenos Aires. From there, we will head to Santiago, Chile together for one night and, finally, spend three nights in Easter Island before heading home.
Using Citi ThankYou Points For The Trip
We’ll be needing the Citi ThankYou points for a few different things:
Points and Cash Rate at Park Hyatt Palacio Duhau in Buenos Aires
The Palacio Duhau Park Hyatt Buenos Aires has been voted as the Number 3 Top Hotel in Argentina on TripAdvisor and we can’t wait to see it. It’s pricey at $600 a night for our days, but we’re going to be redeeming points. It can be booked for
- 20,000 Hyatt Gold Passport points a night or
- 10,000 Hyatt Gold Passport points + $125 Points and Cash Rate
We opted for the latter and will be needing 60,000 Hyatt Gold Passport points + $750 to cover the stay. With Citi ThankYou points, we are able to order Hyatt gift checks paying 10,000 points for each $100 gift check and then use those to settle the bill. In particular, we will pay the $125 cash portion for each night with these checks.
Total Citi ThankYou points needed: 75,000 points
Incidentals at Park Hyatt Palacio Duhau in Buenos Aires
While we’ll be staying at Park Hyatt Palacio Duhau, no doubt we’ll be running up a bill on incidentals: breakfast, room service, perhaps a few other things. We’ll also be able to use Hyatt gift checks to pay for these.
At the Andaz Maui last December, I ate at a number of restaurants on the property, including the newly opened Morimoto, and used Hyatt gift checks to cover the entire bill. We’re thinking we will be needing about $100 a day for these incidentals, though we may re-evaluate that later on.
Total Citi ThankYou points needed: 60,000 points.
Hotel in Easter Island?
Of course, the highlight of our trip is the three nights we’ll be spending in Easter Island. Hotel options there are not very plentiful and hotels are certainly not cheap. There are no chain hotels on the island (Hyatt, Hilton, Marriott, Starwood), unsurprisingly, so any hotel loyalty points won’t be any good there. Although we haven’t completed our research yet, we essentially have two options for paying:
Citi ThankYou Points
The Citi ThankYou Rewards Center has a number of hotels available for booking. I don’t tend to use this option much as I prefer to redeem award points for hotel stays and stays booked through the Citi ThankYou points are non-refundable. The Hare Noi, which is the number one hotel in Easter Island according to TripAdvisor, is available, but for 50,000 points a night! It’s not clear if we’ll use this many points to book a stay there, but at least we do have that option.
Barclaycard Arrival Miles
With Barclaycard Arrival miles, there are far more options as these points can be used for any travel expense and these are super easy to redeem. We just pay for the expense with the Barclaycard Arrival MasterCard through Expedia or the hotel website or wherever and then go online to redeem the miles as a statement credit. Miles redeem at 1 cent each with a 10% rebate.
A more basic hotel with breakfast plan through Expedia costs $177 hotel for a triple room. With all taxes already included, the total rate for 3 nights is $532 or 48,000 Barclaycard Arrival miles. The sign-up bonus for the Barclaycard Arrival MasterCard is 40,000 miles (or $440 in statement credits toward travel) and the card earns 2 points per dollar on all spending, essentially a 2.2% cash back rate. This may just be the option we’ll take!
Earning Citi ThankYou Points
Although I don’t know where I will personally stand with a March point earning contest with my fellow bloggers, I am happy to say I’ve been progressing quite well on the Citi ThankYou points front. The first week results will be posted on Monday, but I earned a little bit over 100,000 Citi ThankYou points this week to start off.
I took a super-efficient strategy of buying Vanilla Reloads at CVS and using it to pay off bills. Because stopping at CVS on the way home from work takes virtually no time being just two blocks out of my way, this is something I can work into my lifestyle even with my extremely busy work schedule. I stayed true to my promise to not change my habits and make sure my point earning for Easter Island is as realistic and reflective of “a month in the life” of my point earning as possible. In the meantime, I wrote a guest post on Saverocity about buying Vanilla Reloads in NYC efficiently. Of course, I am lucky enough to have several friends and family who are happy to let me use their Bluebirds and that’s why I can keep the whole thing so seamless!
The credit card I used was the Citi ThankYou Preferred card, which I signed up for last year when it was offering 5 points per dollar for the first 12 months on spending at drugstores, grocery stores and gas stations. Sadly, this offer is no longer available, but I did mention some other credit cards offering drugstore bonuses in the post: Credit Cards with Drugstore Category Bonus: An Update.
We are also tackling the $10,000 spending requirement for the Citi American Airlines 100,000 mile credit card offers we signed up for and I’ll report on that shortly!
Hi professor,
Thanks for the post. It seems you refer to using the barclaycard points and sign up bonus a lot for your trips. How do you get so many points to use over and over, do you churn this card every 6 months?
I actually only signed up for the card once and use it for all my spending that doesn’t earn me a bonus with a different credit card already… so that adds up fairly quickly. The main thing is I frequently travel with other people and we split our expenses with points. So with me, boyfriend, friends and family all having the card, we can take turns covering the Barclaycard Arrival miles expense while someone else contributes other points. We used my points when I went to Maine and train tickets from Milan, boyfriend’s points in Hawaii, Svetlana’s parents for intra-Asia flights last winter and my parents are going to use theirs for their trip to Europe… so that’s why I can write about all these uses :)
I’d suggest you to check Citi Prestige instead, it’s much better card for everyday spending. Earns around 2.8 cents per dollar towards air tickets (with flight points), and has super incentives. It’s a Amex Platinum rival.
Why do use Bluebird? Serve has surpassed Bluebird few months ago. You can load it directly from credit card in CVS with no fee, and you can load additional $1000 from credit card online, and additional $1000 from debit card online. Bluebird is passé.
I think the Citi Prestige is a good card, but the annual fee is $450 (although you can get back $200) so that’s something to consider and make sure the benefits are worth it. I am most likely going to switch over to Serve from Bluebird at some point for myself, but haven’t gotten around to this yet :) As for buying Vanilla Reloads, I need to buy these anyway as the load limit is $1000 per day and I’d like to bring them home to load later so I don’t need to go to CVS every time to load.
For CitiGold account holders it’s $350 AF, and if you apply in a branch there is a theoretical bonus of 60k TYPs.
You can also load Vanilla reloads to serve, but there is a fee, while loading serve in CVS is free.
So you spent $20k in one week on Citi Thankyou card in one week? I hope it didn’t raise a red flag at Citi fraud department. I’m also spending a lot this month on Thankyou card, but much less than $20k, and I’m kinda scared that Citi may motice it. They called me few times in a past, because of large purchases, but just to verify that it was me. This month I’m going to spend around $8k on this card, and they recently raised my limit to $13700. Do you think it’s gonna be OK?
I split among 3 Citi cards to minimize spending and this week I am using a Wells Fargo card as well… one of my risk minimization techniques to use many cards instead of just one heavily :) You should do what you personally are comfortable with, but all I can say is I feel ok spending that much over a month period and I have accepted that there is a small chance I may lose my points.
Professor – how does the vanilla reload work? I searched online and it was coming up as a scam. thanks.
Here is my article on it: http://milesprof.wpengine.com/2013/01/21/the-bluebird-and-vanilla-reload-cards-the-ultimate-ticket-to-luxurious-vacations/
I enjoyed your blog and am trying to ape your travel. My question is with Hyatt G C , I read somewhere that it can only be for Hyatt brand and not say Park Hyatt ,also how does that convert in term of currency fluctuation.
Thanks Nid
Glad you find the blog useful! The Park Hyatt hotels have had no problem accepting this and they’ve been used at Park Hyatt Maldives, though not by me. It may be a good idea to call the hotel ahead of time and make sure, though, just not to have any surprises. The hotel is able to convert your final bill to USD and then use Hyatt gift certificates to settle the bill in the USD currency, though of course, if the exchange rate is low on the day you check out, you’ll have to pay a little more.
Hmm… this is the first I’ve heard of moving _back_ to Serve. Last I checked, it was easy to get money in, but hard to get it out (e.g., no bill pay). Has this changed? And what are the advantages of mileage-earning via Serve vs. Bluebird?
P.S. — I’d be very, very wary of Citibank. Though (against my better judgment) I took the bait and applied for the 100K AA mile citicard recently, I’ve had just too many bad experiences with Citi in the past (like when they dramatically changed the rules mid-stream re point redemptions).
Serve actually added the bill pay feature last year, which was not available before that, so there have been changes to it. The advantage of Serve over Bluebird at this point is that you can directly load the funds onto Serve at CVS or 7-11 without having to purchase a Vanilla Reload. You can also load online via credit card or debit card, but I haven’t played around with these features myself.
Changing point redemption values or award charts is quite common and something we have to be prepared to handle. The Citi ThankYou Premier card changed values from 1.33 cent per mile to 1.25 recently and I took it as par for the course. I just don’t plan to keep the points I accumulate for a long time and know what I’m getting into… but with that in mind, the opportunities are plentiful :)
Is the only advantage to having a Serve the ability to load funds at CVS? That’s seems useless if you’re just using these cards to transfer points funds from credit cards. The only reason I can see to switch is if Serve allowed more than $5K per month onto the card.
Ah, I just did some more reading, and the main benefit of Serve is that you can use a credit or debit card at CVS to direct-load money to Serve, skipping the VR cards and VR card fees. $500 max per swipe, though.
Interesting. I’ll have to look into this if that’s the case.
I looked into this further and found that there are cash advance fees if you directly load using a credit card.
The value of 1 TYP for Citi Prestige cardholders is now 1.6 cents, when buying tickets on AA or US Air and 1.33 for all other airlines
Yes! That actually may have tipped the scale for me to get that card… I am Platinum on American Airlines this year!
I don’t understand that, though. Why shouldn’t 2cpp be the floor, when you can easily get 2 cents cash per dollar spent on other cards? More specifically, why put spending on a card (except for min bonus spend) that earns 1.6% when you can put the same spending on, say, a Fidelity Amex or Venture card and get 2%?
Yes, of course, if I were going to be using a card for just base spending, then Barclaycard Arrival beats pretty much everyone with 2.2% cash back and it makes no sense to use something that’s 1.6% cash back and only for US Airways/American Airlines flights. However, in this case, I am earning Citi ThankYou points at 5 point per dollar specifically at drugstores… with the Prestige Card, they become worth 1.6 cents each. With a 5 point multiplier, that’s pretty great.
Ah, d’oh, had missed that. Of course that makes good sense then (though I have to say, I still hate Citibank!). Thanks for the clarification :)
What is the best credit card deal now?
I’m going to apply for a new card this week, giving you the credit, and need to know.