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I don’t get ANY referral if you apply for the Citi Thank You Premier with a 50,000 point sign-up bonus. This is much better than my referral link of 30,000 points.Million Mile Secret reader Carrie (thanks!) emailed me yesterday to let me know that she found a link to the 50,000 bonus points Citi Thank You Premier offer with the 1st year fee waived after spending $2,500 within 3 months. Here’s a direct link to the application page in case the landing page disappears later.
I immediately updated the Bank Rewards Points page under the “Travel Credit Cards” tab at the top of the blog so that you have access to only the best offers. I later updated the Hot Deals tab as well with this offer.
Lots of folks wrote in over the weekend to tell me that this was the beginning of the end for mega credit card bonuses.
I couldn’t disagree more!
There are 13 separate credit card offers each offering 50,000 miles/points or more on the Hot Deals tab. We’ve never had so many offers for 50,000 miles or points at one time in the history of our hobby!
I’ve also been reading the public statements, talking with friends in the industry (my business school classmates and alumni develop a lot of the marketing campaigns for financial institutions), and generally analyzing the state of the banking industry. And at one point I almost worked in the industry.
The CARD act has dramatically changed the rules of the games for banks and one of the ways they will compete (at least in the short or medium term) will be by attracting new users via higher sign-up bonuses. 2012 will be a another good year for credit card sign-up bonuses. At no other time have we ever had 13 50,000 mile or point offers available at 1 time (sure, not all of them are public links) and it is only February.
Anyway, back to the Citi ThanK You Premier. On Friday, my referral link for the 50,000 Citi Thank You Premier with the 1st year fee waived stopped working. I couldn’t find a better link so I updated the Bank Rewards Points tab with the 30,000 point offer (which paid me a referral) and noted that it was best to wait for a better offer on the Citi Thank You card.
On Saturday morning, Million Mile Secrets reader Cheaplee (thanks!) emailed me a link to a 50,000 point Citi Thank You Premier offer, but the $125 annual fee was not waived. Since this was a public link, it didn’t pay me a referral, but I removed my referral link for the 30,000 point version and replaced it with the 50,000 version because 50,000 bonus point is clearly better than 30,000 bonus points.
But thanks to Million Mile Secrets reader Carrie, we now have a link to the 50,000 Citi Thank You Premier with the 1st year annual fee waived. As I’ve said before, this is a great deal for getting coach tickets for travel within the US. 50,000 Thank You points will get you $665 worth of air travel if you redeem through the Citi Thank You Portal.
I also wouldn’t worry about Citi not honoring the offer, though I’d make screenshots of the offer page and applications just in case. With Citi, you usually get the miles or points even if the offer landing page doesn’t work, but the credit card application works.
For example, the Citi AAdvantage 75,000 mile offers worked for months after the landing page died and lots of Million Mile Secrets readers together earned millions of American Airline miles!
Bottom Line: The 50,000 Citi Thank You Premier is back with the 1st year fee waived and is an easy way to have Big Travel with Small Money within the US.