Redeem Citi Thank You Points for Kohl’s, Gap, Gilt Gift Cards at a Discount

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• You can always buy these GCs at a 10%-30% discount, so you're getting 0.8-1 cpm even with the 10% off sale.
  IMHO that makes it a lousy redemption anyhow.

  • For the sake of this discussion (started by Franklin) , we're ignoring the travel redemption value of TYP. The options that others (and myself) are evaluating right now - and not in 2016 or whenever we'd have a chance to use the surplus - is to use it towards the following three choices:

    - gift card redemption
    - statement credit
    - student loan or mortgage payment

    Again, the value of a point is in the eye of the beholder and is highly YMMV. I'll accumulate TYP much faster than I'll use them and I don't want to sit on a nest egg of a few hundred thousand points, especially when I have them up the wazoo w/ Amex and UR.

    It goes without saying the best value is to use towards travel. I reiterate, not everyone is in a position (or desire) to use them towards that, thus the value is based on the 3 aforementioned choices. When you note that you can buy these gift cards at 10-30% off, you're missing the fact that these TYP aren't cash. They're points. You can't compare them to cash or cash equivalents because our options for redemption are limited, where as cash is king.

    Also, the Kohl's gift cards are typically between 5-10% on the secondary market. More often than not you're looking at about 7-8% off on these gift cards. We're not even looking into the fact that used gift cards carry the inherent risk of having funds drained while they sit in your wallet. The other cards I agree that the discount is too large elsewhere and IMO (again a personal thing) I'd rather use the TYP at 1:1 for our mortgage or student loans.

• "If you have one of the higher-end Thank You cards, the points could be redeemed at a value of 1.25¢ – 1.6¢ per point by redeeming for travel, making this a bad deal."

  You can't use this as a basis for whether or not something is a good/bad deal. Yes, you can get more "value" from redeeming for flights in terms of retail costs -- but no good travel hacker never pays full retail for flights, anyway. Most importantly, points and miles can and will always be replenished, and a person can only possibly travel so much. But if you pay cash for your clothes at Kohls, that money is gone forever.

  #teamGCredemption

  • "but no good travel hacker never pays full retail for flights, anyway."

    Speak for yourself. If you want to earn elite status on an airline, especially AA, a Citi Prestige and a bunch of ThankYou points are absolutely invaluable.

    Not to mention there are plenty of times I'd be better off using TYP (or paying cash) for a flight rather than use AA miles. I redeemed 37k TYP for a round trip ticket next week in F from PHL-MSY. That would cost me 50k AA miles for the same trip, supposing SAAver space is available. That's more than half the cost of an AA award ticket for a first apartment seat on Etihad which is worth thousands of dollars. Using those TYP to pay for the flight also earned me an additional 3k AA miles and 4k elite qualifying points.

  • Great points. I agree with everything stated. We can't travel much for the next year and even if we did I earn points faster than we can use them so gift card redemption can make sense. So does the mortgage and student loan option for typ.