Citi Travel blocking hotel bookings in Egypt, UAE, Malaysia, and Indonesia (and maybe other places?)

A reader pointed out the fact that Citi Travel is inexplicably blocking hotel reservations in certain countries. The places where we’ve thus far found this to be true include Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Azerbaijan. It is possible that there are other countries affected, though I’ve searched quite a few other places and have not yet found another country to be totally blocked.

Citi recognizes that there are hotels, but doesn’t make them available for booking

At first, you might think that Citi simply isn’t getting correct data in its booking platform, and that is making it appear as though there are no hotels available.

However, that doesn’t appear to be the issue here. It seems like Citi is aware that there are hotels, but it isn’t making them bookable.

For instance, see this search for properties in Cairo, Egypt from February 9-11, 2026.

As you can see above, the results say “We couldn’t find any results that match your search criteria. Please modify your search and try again”.

However, note that under the city name (Cairo), it says “257 properties available”. Furthermore, the page with no search results says “Page 1 of 3”. Note also that the price range lists 0 – $3,240 USD.

I tried switching to map view, and the map view similarly shows no properties despite the text saying, “There are 258 available properties”.

You can also notice above that there is a breakdown of property type — it shows 275 Hotel, 46 Guesthouse/bed and breakfast, 3 Motel, 61 Hostel, etc. If you select one of the categories, like “Hostel”, the price range automatically adjusts to $0-$70, suggesting that Citi is aware of the pricing of hotels in that category.

However, they seem to be blocking hotels from display.

And it isn’t just in Egypt that this is happening. The exact same situation happens for hotel searches in Malaysia, like this example in Kuala Lumpur, where you can once again see the price range and the number of options in each of the property type categories (and it shows 1,311 properties available under the city name).

I tried sorting in different ways, and I also tried searching in Kota Kinabalu, with the same results.

Indonesia has the same situation. Surprisingly, though Citi reports more than six thousand properties available under “Bali”, and 73 pages of hotel results, they seem to block booking any of them.

We found this Flyertalk thread mentioning the issue also occurring in the entirety of the United Arab Emirates and in Baku, Azerbaijan (the same poster indicates that Thailand is blocked, but I found hotels in Bangkok, Chiang Mai, Phuket, and Koh Samui without issue). I searched both Dubai and Abu Dhabi and got the same results as for the cities shown above.

There are, of course, some countries that are blocked entirely due to government sanctions, but in those cases I don’t see any hotels or property types listed under the city name (like in Moscow) or I can’t find cities in the country at all in the search tool (like Havana or Bagdad, which don’t show up at all). However, I found hotels available through Citi in a number of countries on Wikipedia’s list of countries with targeted US sanctions. I also searched a handful of cities that fall on various lists of places deemed by many governments to be unsafe to visit, and I found hotels available through Citi, so it isn’t like they are working off of some particularly conservative list of places they don’t want to send their customers.

I also searched for a number of cities in places where the US doesn’t have particularly warm relations that were still available to book. For instance, the US does not have diplomatic relations with Afghanistan, but I found a hotel bookable via Citi in Kabul.

It is impossible not to notice that all of the countries we’ve seen blocked in the way outlined in this post (which is to say where cities return a number of available hotels but show none bookable) are predominantly Muslim (Egypt, UAE, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Azerbaijan). However, I see hotels available in many other predominantly-Muslim countries (like Jordan, Qatar, Lebanon, and the example above in Afghanistan). I don’t know what to make of it.

I think this could be unintentional

While on the one hand, the country blocking seems pretty highly targeted in this case, I think it is possible that there is an IT issue at play.

The main reason I think this could be an IT issue rather than an effort to block certain destinations is because in Bali, when I select “Hotel Collection”, which is one of Citi’s luxury booking platforms (similar to Amex’s The Hotel Collection or Capital One’s Lifestyle Collection), Bali returns a price range of $0-$390 USD despite showing no available properties.

The fact that a price range exists suggests that Citi has Hotel Collection partners in Bali (from which they are receiving pricing information). If a partnership like that exists, it would seem strange to then block the ability to book that partner.

That said, I don’t get a price range at all when selecting The Reserve or Hotel Collection on a search for hotels in Dubai. That’s relatively surprising given the plethora of luxury hotels in that market. If this were simply a short-term IT issue, I would be surprised to learn that they had no luxury hotel partners in Dubai.

At this point, I’d say that this is a developing story, but it is worth being aware that some destinations are blocked. That may be of particular importance if you have plans to use your Citi Strata Elite hotel booking credit.

Bottom line

While blocking hotels in a few countries probably isn’t a major issue for most Citi customers, it is nonetheless strange to see entire countries blocked in this way, particularly given the inconsistency. And given the relative popularity and perceived safety of places like Bali and Kuala Lumpur, I was particularly surprised not to find any hotel booking options for destinations like those. If you intend to use your Citi Strata Elite hotel credit, you might want to check in advance to make sure that your destination has the hotels you expect.

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