New Citi Transfer Partner: Preferred Hotels and Resorts “I Prefer”

Citi added yet another hotel partner today, brings the total to 5: Choice Hotels, Wyndham Rewards, Accor Live Limitless, Leader’s Club, and now Preferred Hotels and Resorts “I Prefer”.

Points will transfer at a 1:4 ratio, so 1,000 ThankYou = 4,000 Preferred.

Interestingly, many of you still have Titanium status at Preferred Hotels and Resorts I Prefer program, from an opportunity a few months ago. (No longer available).

Another interesting thing about this is that you can already book quite a few Preferred Hotels and Resorts hotels via Choice Privileges, another Citi partner, and one that transfers 1:2.

But about that:

1. Only a handful of the wider Preferred Hotels & Resorts portfolio is available via the Choice partnership. (Note that after that article, redemption rates rose twice, reducing the bargain). 
2. It doesn’t seem possible to find award availability using all points (where the bargains would be). The range of prices in points should be from 15,000 to 150,000 points per night.

I just did some searches and can only find Cash + Points options which lines up with what a few others have posted. I thought maybe in my Titanium account I might have more luck, but I don’t.

As a sample, I took a look at the upscale Shutters on the Beach in Santa Monica. 

Here are my options:

So 30,000 points saves me just about $200. That’s 0.67 cents per point or a more than reasonable 2.68 cents per ThankYou point. However, that leaves me paying cash for the rest, a move I’m not willing to make.

If we could find a full award, we could figure out how good a deal this is, however I searched tons of dates at this property and even though I’m checking the absolute lowest price nights in cash, I cannot find an all-points rate for any day.

I then went back to the I Prefer homepage and found that if you click into Benefits > Use Rewards it will show hotels with a points calendar!

Unfortunately, it’s not real time. Whether the hotel was 75,000 points or 150,000 points. night I consistently clicked a rate / date on the calendar only to be told no rooms at that rate were available.

Basically, in 30 minutes of searching, I found nothing. Have you?

The bottom line is that a new partner is great, but only if we can book hotels using their points 😉

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Thoughts?

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