How I used 15,000 Citi points for a 5-star Bangkok hotel stay

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I’m staying in a five-star hotel for just 4,000 points a night. Yes, that’s right, my four-night luxury stay will cost just 15,000 Citi ThankYou points in total. How? Thanks to a credit card transfer partner you might not be very familiar with.

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After scouring points and cash rates for an upcoming trip to Bangkok, I had narrowed my options down to a few Marriott and IHG properties, all of which ranged anywhere from 20,000 to 50,000 points per night. Although Bangkok — and all of Thailand — tend to have fairly affordable hotel rates, I still didn’t want to spend that many points on a stay, especially considering that cash rates weren’t super high, and I wanted to get top value from my points.

I wasn’t very familiar with the Citi ThankYou Rewards program, but I decided to get the Citi Strata Elite Card because of its lucrative perks, like multiple annual statement credits, and the ability to transfer ThankYou points to American Airlines. After hitting the minimum spending requirement to earn the sign-up bonus, I transferred some of the points to AA for a redemption I’d been eyeing, but still had a lot of points leftover.

Once I started digging into Citi’s hotel transfer partners, I found an option I hadn’t previously considered: I Prefer Hotel Rewards, the loyalty program for Preferred Hotels & Resorts.

What really caught my attention was the transfer ratio: 1:4. For every 1,000 Citi ThankYou points I transferred to I Prefer, I’d end up with 4,000 I Prefer Rewards points.

That ratio felt too good to be true. There had to be a caveat, such as the points required for a night’s stay at a Preferred hotel being hundreds of thousands of points. But the transfer deal is legitimate, and Preferred hotel rates are actually extremely reasonable in many cases (though they definitely vary by destination).

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When I searched for points rates in Bangkok on the I Prefer website, I found The Landmark, a five-star hotel on Sukhumvit Road, a major thoroughfare. It cost $141 or 16,000 iPrefer points per night, totaling $564 or 60,000 iPrefer points plus $26 in taxes and fees for my four-night stay.

However, thanks to Citi’s impressive 1:4 transfer ratio, I only had to transfer 15,000 Citi ThankYou points, which converted to 60,000 iPrefer Reward points, to cover the entire stay.

Doing the math, I got a value of about 3.7 cents per point on this hotel stay. Considering I value Citi ThankYou points around 1.6 to 1.8 cents apiece, I was thrilled to get nearly double that on this redemption.

Preferred Hotels & Resorts doesn’t have as large of a footprint as chains like Hilton and Marriott, but its global portfolio still tops 600 independent hotels across 80+ countries. It has an especially large footprint in Mexico, Italy, and across the U.S.

There are lots of luxury properties, so not every option will net you this high value of a redemption. But if you have a stash of Citi points, it's worth keeping this transfer partner in mind.

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