Citi launched two new 25% transfer bonuses today: one to Avianca LifeMiles and another to Leader Hotels of World (LHW) Leader’s Club.
LHW is a loose marketing affiliation of over 400 luxury hotels around the world, more or less comparable to Small Luxury Hotels of the World (SLH), Preferred Hotels and Resorts and Mr and Mrs Smith. I believe that this is the first time that Citi has run a transfer bonus to Leader’s Club and the additional 25% could potentially make it a very interesting proposition.
The Deal
- Get a 25% bonus when transferring Citi ThankYou Points to Leading Hotels of the World Leader’s Club.
- During the bonus period, you’ll get 1 Leader’s Club point for every 4 Citi ThankYou point that you transfer to Leading Hotels of the World.
- Expires October 19th, 2024.
Quick Thoughts
Citi added Leading Hotels of the World (LHW) as a a unique partner last year, making it the only bank currency able to do so. ThankYou Points normally transfer at a 5:1 ratio from Citi to LHW, so it will improve to 4:1 during the bonus period.
That sounds like a terrible ratio, but Greg found that Leader’s Club points are usually worth between 8-9 cents each towards hotel redemptions, depending on how taxes and fees are factored in. With this month’s transfer bonus, that means that you’d easily be getting 2 cents per point value or more for your Citi points, a nice proposition that may be worth a speculative transfer for some folks…especially given the caliber of the hotels one offer and that upgrades, free breakfast and welcome gifts are part of LHW bookings.
For those folks who have a Citi Rewards+ card and haven’t taken full advantage of the 10% calendar-year rebate on up to 100,000 points in transfers, this deal gets even sweeter. My wife and I have 50K capacity left for 2024, so we’ll probably use that towards this LHW offer. We’d get a total of 12,500 Leader’s Club points for 45,000 Citi Points (once we get the 10% rebate back), giving us an ending expected return of ~2.25-2.5 cents per ThankYou Point. That’s good enough to get me to transfer speculatively.
Leader’s Club points do have a 24-month expiry, but that can be extended by earning or redeeming points, so it’s fairly simple to keep unused points alive.
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Warning: as of today (9/18/24), transferring points into LHW does not extend expiry.
I created my LHW account in October 2023 when they were giving out 500 points to new accounts. After transferring 250 points to LHW earlier today (posted instantly), now all 750 of my points show as expiring in October 2025.
This is great. Just used this to book JK Place in Paris
Any best opportunities?
If you’re headed to Berlin, redeeming LHW points at the Hotel Adlon Kempinski (which is a stone’s throw from the Brandenburg Gate) seems to give about 13-14 cents of value per point
Was just there on points this past summer. Breakfast buffet is amazing, and everything else about the hotel is fantastic too.
I had a few other LHW bookings in Europe as well. Among the places I searched, almost everything was consistent 8 cpp. Adlon was the only outlier. Not sure if it’s a unicorn, or if I’ll find more when I’m traveling other places.
My redemption at the time was 4583 points/night for a Junior Suite, which worked out to ~14.2 cpp (this is per LHW point, so roughly 2.84 cpp for TYP without any transfer bonus).
This is a topic that would benefit from FM’s best in class 10 hours of research type posts. Begging. Praying. (Also knowing that you guys are so on it, it’s probably coming.)
LOL guess what I’ve been doing all day?
The value is there. People can pick their properties. Perhaps the real story needs to be about methods to pump out Citi points the way there are to pump out Chase points.
So does transfering points again to the program extends the expiry date? i.e transferring count as earning?
Unfortunately it doesn’t seem like it does, which significantly increases the risk of speculative transfers.
To be fair, LHW points are closer to 8 cents. And, the Rewards+ is not scalable. Still, at scale, this is great.
Check out Greg’s post linked above. There are additional fees that were waived (which aren’t indicated at booking) that made it closer 9 cents on his redemptions. It doesn’t sound like that’s 100% of the time, though.
Understood. I did a sample of several properties assuming taxes and fees were covered and the member would not be responsible for them. Perhaps luck of the draw/sample error on my part. Nonetheless, redeeming Citi points at 2cpp for a hotel is great.
Sounds great, thanks for sharing! Are there any standout/aspirational properties your are eyeing or worth looking at?