After a couple of years of not doing much, Citi finally picked up its game a bit in 2014 to introduce new cards and revamp its rewards program. The latest change, which I only recently noticed, is that Citi seems to have finally retired its venerable AT&T Universal Card, a product which had been around for about 20 years, an eternity in this industry.
The new card is called the AT&T Access Card. Whereas the old card gave you a 10% discount on AT&T services, the new card seems to be more of a ThankYou Point-centric product. You now only get 2 TYPs per dollar spent on AT&T but you also get 2 TYPs per dollar spent on travel and retail sites. And that could possibly be interesting in light of the airline transfer partners Citi now has for the TYP program.
Note that you can only transfer your TYPs if you have a ThankYou Premier or Prestige card. But if you do, Gary has a nice rundown of what you can do with those TYPs. As per Gary, the current list of transfer partners is:
- Air France-KLM
- Asia Miles
- Etihad Airways Guest
- EVA Air Infinity MileageLands
- Garuda Indonesia GarudaMiles
- Hilton HHonors
- Malaysia Airlines Enrich
- Qatar Airways Privilege Club
- Singapore Airlines KrisFlyer
- Thai Airways Royal Orchid Plus
Two points per dollar isn’t a ton, but I could see it being useful if you figured out some sort of manufactured spend type of activity you could do online. The question is what would count as “online retail” for Citi’s purposes. The terms and conditions say this:
Retail websites are websites that sell goods directly to the consumer through an online website and include department store websites, specialty store websites, warehouse store websites and boutique websites.
We’ll leave it to the philosophers to determine if Amazon Payments would have counted.
Bottom line: unless you know what you’re doing, you can probably ignore this one.
very good transfer partner list.
FWIW I have the Universal Card – it was my first “adult” CC back in the early 1990’s. Mine has not been converted.
That was my first card as well. I think it ultimately became a ThankYou card.
I actually do a lot of online shopping and reselling through portals. I’m definitely going to pick this card up on my next go round. Thanks for the info.
I am (soon to be: was) a charter-member of the AT&T Universal Mastercard, (i.e. since its introduction in 1990), which also meant life-time no annual fee – with at least one activity in a year. At that time, we were living in Texas. We moved to The Netherlands in 1993, and had no problems with the card till now, which at some point of time became owned by Citibank.
A few weeks ago I received a letter announcing the closure of service – with the reason that “Citi no longer services U.S. Card products with a mailing address in your country of residence”.
Upon calling Citi, I was informed that this is a result of a change in the terms & conditions in June.