Over the past few days I've run a couple of dummy bookings via Citi Travel to see how it works in practice, whether it offers good value, etc. I thought you may all be interested in the results.
First up, here's how the process works - some of this has been posted before, but I thought I'd re-post it all for clarity:
1) Use the QF Classic Award search engine to find an available award flight you want.
2) Select the flight(s) and take a screenshot / print to PDF.
One of the people I spoke to at Citi Travel said they need to see the "review" page that concisely lists the flights, points and taxes, but I don't see how this is workable as you can't get to it unless you have enough QF points in your account to complete the booking, and the whole point of using Citi's price match is so you
don't redeem points to QF. That being said, the same lady who said they "need to see the 'review' page" was also quite happy to do a price match based on a screenshot of the flight selection screen (with points total at the bottom), so who knows.
3) Send an e-mail to
[email protected] with "Qantas Price Match Request" in the subject line, the screenshot take in #2 attached, and your name / contact number in the e-mail body. Don't include CC numbers or anything like that.
4) They call you back and let you know what they can do. Any offer made is valid for 3 days (business days I assume). Out of the two dummy price matches I submitted, it only took a few hours to get a callback about the first one (domestic) and it took about a day (overnight) to get a callback about the second (international).
The offer will be to match the number of points required (i.e. charge the same number of CitiRewards points as you would have needed in QF points) but
not the tax component. From the sounds of it they will charge whatever the actual tax component of the flight they book for you on is, and this appears to be significantly higher than the taxes / surcharges on a QF award redemption. In addition, they charge a $90 booking fee (international only I think) and a 2% CC surcharge for any amounts charged back to your credit card.
The points redemption is also a bit funny. Rather than immediately deducting the points required from your CitiRewards points balance, instead they charge an amount to your credit card which represents the points component at a rate of 1c per 1 CR point. Then, about 14 days later, CitiBank will issue a credit for this amount to your credit card and also deduct the equivalent points from your CitiRewards account.
For example, say they offer to price match a flight that requires 100,000 points, and has a
Citi Travel tax component of $500. If you proceed, they will charge $1,000 (points @ 1c/point) + $500 (taxes) + $90 (booking fee) + $31.80 (2% CC surcharge on the whole amount) = $1588.98 to your card. 14 days later, you will receive a credit of $1,000 on your credit card, and 100,000 CR points will be deducted from your account. Total net cost is therefore 100k CR points & $588.98.
All that aside, on to the actual dummy price matches I submitted. I only did two as I didn't want to waste too much of their time on what was purely a fact finding exercise. Here they are:
Code:
[B]Qantas Itinerary Submitted: [/B]MEL-SYD on QF408 in J & SYD-MEL on QF411 in J
[B]Qantas Price:[/B] 32,000 QF points + $51.46
[B]Citi Travel Itinerary Offered: [/B]MEL-SYD on QF408 in J & SYD-MEL on QF411 in J[B]
Citi Travel Offer:[/B] 32,000 CR points + $202.57 (total net cost after fees, surcharges and 14-day credit back)
[B]Fare Bucket with Citi Travel:[/B]Forgot to ask, sorry.
Code:
[B]Qantas Itinerary Submitted: [/B]MEL-LHR on QF9 in J & LHR-MEL on QF10 in J
[B]Qantas Price: [/B]256,000 QF points + $?? (I couldn't get to the review screen - what are MEL-LHR-MEL QF J award taxes - about $700?)[B]
Citi Travel Itinerary Offered: [/B]MEL-LHR on QF9 in J & LHR-MEL on QF10 in J[B]
Citi Travel Offer:[/B] 256,000 CR points + $1,348.35 (total net cost after fees, surcharges and 14-day credit back)
[B]Fare Bucket with Citi Travel:[/B] I (discount paid business)
Note that they quoted
exactly the same flights in both cases - no trying to turn a QF A380 flight into a China Eastern Airlines 767 flight or similar.
Note also that it looks like they book you into a points / SC earning fare class - I'm assuming they book the cheapest they can buy with cash at the time of your booking - so you
will earn QF points and SCs for the trip, same as a xASA. So in the case of the second dummy booking the real cost is 256,000 CR points + $1,348.35, plus an "earn" of between 31,548 and 52,580 QFF points (depending upon status) and 480 SCs.
All up, I reckon that's a pretty encouraging set of results. Two main benefits I see here:
1) The ability to turn
any Classic Award seat into an xASA, at the cost of higher taxes. However, as I noted earlier in the thread I'm not sure if you will ever find a Classic Award seat that you can't also get as a cheap xASA (can someone confirm?), so not sure if this is a real benefit?
2) More important is the 1 CR to 1 QF point matching without any apparent downsides other than somewhat higher taxes. This effectively makes the Citi Select and Citi Signature cards 2 QF points and 1.5 QF points per $1 spent respectively - and they're
Visa cards! I know QF point burn rates aren't all that flash in isolation, but surely an effective 2 QF points per $1 spent would have to make QF burn rates
via Citi Select about the best burn rate around?
Whew, quite an essay in the end. Hope this is all helpful - would be curious to hear feedback if anyone actually books a flight through them.
EDIT:
Would also be interesting to see if Citi Travel would price match a confirmed QF award booking based on sending them the booking confirmation. My thinking here is that, for QF WPs, this would let you turn an award booking where the Premium Desk specially released seats for you into an xASA equivalent (with the additional cost of the award flight cancellation fee), which you definitely can't do now.
