One of the great developments over the last couple of years was the rollout of Citi Offers to most Citi cardholders. These have the potential to save you a decent amount of money and there are two main types of offer – national offers that are applicable at retailers online and/or in-store around the country and local offers (usually local restaurants) that are within x miles of your zip code.
What you might not have realized is that you have access to local offers throughout the US. If you live in Miami, loading offers to your Citi cards for restaurants in Sacramento isn’t (for the most part) going to be helpful which is why Citi only displays offers near your zip code. However, if you travel domestically – or even if you’re just planning on eating out in a nearby town or city – you could be missing out on money saving offers. Thankfully it’s easy to find local offers for anywhere you’re traveling to domestically – here’s how.
First off, you need to log in to your Citi account and then you can view your Offers Nearby – you can find that landing page here. You can also access your Offers Nearby when viewing your regular Citi Merchant Offers by clicking on the tab next to it:
When viewing the Offers Nearby page, it defaults to the zip code listed on your account and shows you local offers (most likely all restaurants) within a radius of a few miles. From what I can tell, it limits you to seeing the nearest 20 offers.
My Citi cards are still registered in Portsmouth, VA and so that’s what shows up automatically. Having offers near where you live show up is useful for the most part, but what if you’re planning on going out to dinner nearby but outside of that range? All you have to do is change the zip code in the box labeled ‘Offers Near Zip Code’ and voilà – you’ll be presented with a whole new selection of restaurants.
This can be useful when you’re traveling elsewhere in the US too. For example, you can type in the zip code of the Hyatt Regency Seattle (98101) and see which Citi Offers Nearby are close to that property if you’re staying there.
There are a few things to note regarding this functionality. The first is as I mentioned earlier – the list of local spots to eat where you can earn cashback is limited to 20 locations based on those closest to whichever zip code it’s looking up. In larger cities like Seattle, there’s a good chance that there’ll be more than 20 eligible eateries within any given zip code. To get around that limitation somewhat, you can drag the map around and/or zoom in to explore different parts of the city. Once you’ve settled on a location, click the ‘Search This Area’ button at the top of the map and it’ll update the list.
n.b. If all you do is zoom in, that button won’t appear, so you’ll have to drag the map at least a tiny bit to get ‘Search This Area’ to show up. Also, there’s no zoom in and out button. On my laptop’s touchpad, I can place both index fingers in the center and move them apart to zoom in. If you’re using a mouse, holding Ctrl and scrolling the mouse wheel should provide the same functionality. On a Mac, I’ve no clue but I’m sure Google is your friend.
The second thing to note is that as with all Citi Offers, you have to actually load the offer(s) to your card. To do that, simply click the restaurant on the right hand side and scroll down in order to click on the blue ‘Enroll in Offer’ button. This page will also show you the terms of the offer.
It’s also worth noting the address of the restaurant. In most cases this won’t be an issue, but there’ll occasionally be two or more restaurants for the same local chain. I’m not sure if Citi Offers Nearby is as sophisticated as being able to tell one from the other, but I – for once – will give Citi’s IT department credit that they’ll be able to differentiate, so either load both/all offers for the same restaurant or simply make sure you go to the specific location that you loaded the offer for.
The third and final thing to note is that loading an offer initially only loads it to one card – whichever one Citi chooses as your default card. If you have more than one Citi card, you might therefore need to select which card you want to load the offer(s) to. For example, on my account it defaults to my Dividend card, whereas I might prefer to load it to a Custom Cash card to earn 5x if dining is my top spending category for that billing period. Someone with a Citi Prestige card will most likely want to load Nearby Offers to that card seeing as it always offers 5x on dining.
To change which card you’ll load the offer(s) to, click the dropdown box where it says ‘Select an Account’ – that’ll display a list of your eligible Citi cards.
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Whelp, it appears Citi has promptly broken this feature. It now only shows Jos A Banks offers.
It’s little tips like this that make FM so awesome. Thanks, didn’t even know you could do this.
This is a fantastic tip and really improves the usefulness of the Citi Merchant Offers for me. Citi was always showing me restaurants near my house, which isn’t where I usually eat out, and I had always wondered how to change that. So thanks for the great tip!
I wish Amex had something like this. Now if Citi would just fix their terrible web site…
Looks like Rewards Network to me.
Do these Citi offers unenroll your Citi card form other dining or cashback systems?
That’s something I’m not certain about. I’ve noticed that those Nearby Offers line up with some other dining programs and so it might not stack, but I’ve not had a chance to test that yet.
Yes for the dining offers, I got a notice of my Premier card being unenrolled from Marriott dining in the past when I loaded up one of the restaurant offers. This is true only for the dining offers though, enrolling in the national offers never created an issue with the dining program.