Why you shouldn’t combine Thank You point accounts

Update: Points were returned to me within a day.

If you’re like me, it’s possible you have multiple Thank You point earning credit cards. A couple of years ago, when I first got into Thank You points, I thought the ability to combine Thank You point accounts was great. I figured it was like Ultimate Rewards, I can just see all my points together and transfer them back and forth as needed.

Here’s a little story about why you shouldn’t combine your accounts. 

After you combine your Thank You accounts, it’s impossible to tell which card your points have come from. Citi just “conveniently” combines everything into one number. This doesn’t matter until you inevitably want to cancel one of your cards.

After you cancel a Thank You point earning card, you have 60 days to redeem points associated with that card before they expire. The problem is, you have no idea how many points that is thanks to Citi’s Thank You point website.

Here’s what happened to me. I cancelled the Thank You Premier card a few months back. After I cancelled I called Citi twice, asking them to confirm how many points I had associated with the card. I was twice told something on the order of 7,900 points, so I simply transferred 8000 points to Jetblue before 60 days was up.

Welp, I logged in today and my balance has dropped by over 30,000 points. Apparently there were more Thank You points associated with that account than the 7,900! 

I called and after Mr. Unhelpful CSR forwarded me along, Helpful CSRs 2 and 3 said they will escalate my claim. Basically, they are going to go back and listen to our phone calls and if they hear the 7,900 number they will reinstate all the other missing ones. I’m not too worried, but I’m definitely annoyed at myself. All this could have been avoided by keeping my accounts separate in the first place.

One of the major reasons to combine in the past was to make sure all your points could access the Citi Prestige 1.6 cents per point uplift on American Airlines. Since that’s going away, there are fewer and fewer reasons to combine early. Combine when you need to combine, keep separate the rest of the time! That will be my Citi Thank You point mantra from here on out.