Several blogs are now reporting on a Citi Strata Premier card which is expected to launch soon. Here’s what we know about the card.
This is a developing story and we’ll update this post as we find out more information about the card. Nothing below is confirmed by the issuer yet.
Launch date and timeframe
Frequent Miler reported that the new Citi Strata Premier card was going to launch on May 16. It will replace the Citi Premier Card, which will close for new applications on May 9, 2024.
Citi Strata Premier earning details leaked
For a brief time in the last few days, a Citi Strata Rewards card landing page got picked up by Duck Duck Go, as reported by Doctor of Credit. The page got crawled by DuckDuckGo and was showing up as the first result when searching for “Citi Strata Premier.”
Unfortunately, the page is no longer live—the page currently displays an “Access Denied” message when you visit it, and it was not picked up by the Internet Archive. But Doctor of Credit was able to grab the card’s rewards from the page when it was live:
| CitiTravel.com: Hotels, Car Rentals and Attractions | 10x | |
| Air travel | 3x | |
| Restaurants | 3x | |
| Supermarkets | 3x | |
| Gas stations and EV charging | 3x | |
| Hotels | 3x | |
| Other purchases | 1x |
The rewards mirror the rewards of the current Citi Premier® Card, but the bonus for travel booked through Citi appears to be permanent. (The current Citi Premier card offers 10x on travel through Citi as a limited-time bonus.)
Launch welcome bonus: 75,000 points.
The card will launch with a welcome bonus of 75,000 bonus points after spending $4,000 in the first 3 months.
Apparently you will not be eligible for the welcome bonus if you have received a new account bonus for the Citi Premier® card recently. Over on Reddit, someone is reporting that the following language is in the terms and conditions of the welcome bonus: “Bonus ThankYou® Points are not available if you have received a new account bonus for a Citi Premier® or a Citi Strata Premier℠ account in the past 48 months.”
Open questions
Here are the biggest open questions I have about the upcoming launch of the Citi Strata Premier card:
Will the new card include travel and consumer insurance benefits? All of Citi’s cards lag competitors cards when it comes to benefits. The Chase Sapphire Preferred® offers market-leading travel insurance benefits for a card with a $95 annual fee. Pretty much all other travel cards from major banks that charge an annual fee have at least some benefits like trip delay protection, lost luggage insurance, or auto rental collision damage waiver insurance. And an extended warranty benefit is common enough to be almost considered table-stakes, even for no-annual-fee cards.
Without adding a significant quite of travel and consumer insurance benefits, I don’t see how the Citi Strata Premier could compete with offerings from Chase, Capital One, Amex and others.
Will Citi improve the value proposition of booking travel through Citi? The answer to this appears to be no. The launch welcome bonus copy states that the points will be redeemable for $750 in gift cards or travel through Citi, which means no increased redemption value toward travel ala Chase Travel℠
My take: It’s just a rebranding
At this point, the launch of the Citi Strata Premier Card isn’t terribly exciting. It appears to be just a rebranding of the Citi Premier® Card. And this is unfortunate. The Citi Premier® Card lags other travel rewards cards by a considerably margin in almost every respect—it almost seems as if Citi decided to let the ThankYou Rewards® program die a death of attrition years ago.
Of course, we don’t have any of this information directly from Citi yet. Maybe the landing page that leaked was just a placeholder? Perhaps the card is launching with market-leading travel insurance or a way to redeem points for additional value? I’m hopeful that there is something more to this story.
