Citi Offering 20% Transfer Bonus to Cathay Pacific

Like American Express, but unlike Chase Ultimate Rewards, Citi often offers promotional bonus transfer rates to different travel partners. For example, Citi is currently offering a transfer bonus to Hilton until September 20, 2017. A new transfer bonus is to Cathay Pacific Asia Miles. Citi is currently offering a 20% transfer bonus to Cathay Pacific Asia Miles until September 6, 2017. 

This is an interesting bonus for a few reasons.

Citi just upped the sign-up bonus on the Citi Prestige® Card to 75,000 after spending $7,500 and is offering a 50,000 point sign-up bonuses for the Citi® ThankYou® Premier Card after you spend $4,000 in the first 3 months, so this is a perfect time to quickly earn a lot of ThankYou Points. Make sure to keep in mind the Citi application rules if you’re wanting to apply for these cards so that you don’t miss out on a bonus.

Also, the Cathay Pacific co-branded credit card just jumped up to 50,000 miles after $2,500 worth of spend. And don’t forget that Cathay Pacific is also a 1:1 transfer partner of American Express Membership Rewards. The 20% transfer bonus is only for points transferred from Citi, but this is yet another way for you to build up your Asia Miles account balance.

Cathay Pacific is one of the best oneworld Alliance partners. They operate two distance-based charts depending on if you’re booking partner airlines or not but both charts offer great redemption rates to places like Europe, South America, Asia, and Australia (pretty much everywhere).

One of the most talked about sweet spots is 80,000 to Europe. With the transfer bonus you could get that 64,000 ThankYou Points, which is an outstanding deal, especially if you booked a partner like Aer Lingus with minimal fees.

You can read more about redeeming on Cathay Pacific here.

One major thing to keep in mind that is your Cathay Pacific miles will expire after 3 years unless you pay a very expensive renewal fee. Thus, if you don’t think you’ll be using these points pretty soon, it’s probably a lot safer to just pass on this promotion since you’ll risk wasting your ThanYou Points.