Citi ThankYou offers flight search tips, How do users find a decent price despite the system’s severe limitations?

Recently, reports flooded the Internet that Citi has a new signup offer for the Citi ThankYou prestige card. The latest offer is worth 50,000 bonus points for just $3,000. The flight search tips are also available so users can book flights at their lowest prices.

Card user Greg the Frequent Miler mentioned about his recent experience trying to get Citi's flight search engine to work. He said, "Citi wanted to charge me $1,680.60 for the same flights that I could buy elsewhere for less than $800. No thank you!" 

City ThankYou prestige card is quite more than the previous standard offer of 30,000 bonus points. Included in the offer is also a 60,000 bonus points, but only in a branch and with a rather large $15,000 total of spend requirement. With this, a lot of people are convinced that the recent  offer is probably a good choice.

Although the Citi ThankYou prestige card is pretty costly at $450 per year, it provides a lot that it can even effectively lower the price down by over half every single year. Citibank has provided great deals just last year when they added transfer partners to their ThankYou program. But as recently argued, the transfer partners is allegedly not the greatest way to spend ThankYou points. 

On the other hand, if users want to take advantage of the Citi Prestige's feature of booking airfares directly with ThankYou points, they can have a redemption rate of 1.6 cents per point for all American and US Airways tickets and 1.33 cents per point for all other airlines. So with that, they can greatly value by booking flights directly while still acquiring additional miles for flying the tickets.

And because airfares bought directly through the ThankYou program are profits tickets, users have all of the benefits of the purchased tickets. The advantages include redeemable mileage accrual, elite mileage accrual, the capacity to get American upgrade stickers or even upgrade with miles if you decide to do so. The offer is also considered entitled for promotional bonus miles if booked in a qualified booking class.

Sounds like a good catch for clients, but one problem arises with booking tickets in this manner. The Citi ThankYou booking engine is apparently not the greatest offer after all. The  ThankYou booking engine allegedly has problems and isn't anywhere near as flexible as Google Flights, OTA like Orbitz or Travelocity. But it turns out that there are a few minor tricks customers can manipulate to win over better results from the ThankYou booking engine. 

The first thing to do for finding flights is to search through different engines. Use Google Flights, ITA Matrix, or an OTA to find the actual flights to book and their estimated prices. The client writes down all the details, including airports, airlines, dates, times, flight numbers, everything. The user now uses Citi ThankYou search engine and manipulates its search fields.

In the search engine, the clients mostly notice the JetBlue  that is slightly cheaper nonstop price of $333 for the round trip or $339 after ThankYou tacks on their vig, but the American/US Airways flights are more than 4,000 ThankYou points cheaper. This is because we're getting 1.6 cents per point on American and US Airways via the Prestige card instead of 1.33 cents per point on other airlines.

Sometimes specifying the departure time doesn't find the flights, so instead other users try restricting the search to a specific airline. The clients might also try searching for itinerary with the Multiple Destinations option.  When the ThankYou user already manipulated every search permutation but can't get the ThankYou engine to come up with the flights, this is the time to call a booking agent at the ThankYou Travel Center to book the flight over the phone.

Meanwhile the Citi ThankYou prestige card is purportedly of great value, but it only depends on how users manipulate them.  Although, there were alleged turn downs for the ThankYou card, it still remains as one of the consumer's favorite offers to use for booking flights.