Citi Strata Elite Vs. Citi Strata Premier: Best Premium ThankYou Card?

I had the Strata Premier for a year to earn the SUB, then downgraded to Strata no-fee, which has the unique 3x category for barbers/hair salons. In order to make the Premier a 'keeper' card, you'd need to at least use the $100/year on Citi's travel portal, which can be a bit tedious.

I opened the the Strata Elite earlier this year, and have already used its various credits ($100 credit on Blacklane was actually pretty good in NYC; $200 Splurge for AA gift cards is a quick 'win,' too, and the $300 hotel credits, again, a little tedious, but, it works; I prefer the Amex Platinum $300 FHR 1 night credit, personally). And I've been using the Citi Nights 6x for drinks/dinners on Fridays and Saturdays (after all my Resy stuff from Amex got used up). So, I'm actually warming up to keeping the Strata Elite, honestly.

Oh, and the Admirals Club passes are worthless to me. Got the Citi AA Exec card already, so... but who knows, maybe that's a 'deal-maker' for some of y'all...

The Strata Premier $100 hotel credit, makes the card FREE. It's insanely easy to use and credits at time of booking, unlike the Sapphire Preferred where you have to wait. And you get 10x points on the remainder of your hotel reservation cost.

The only issue is that Citi's travel portal basically adds a surcharge to those bookings, which, in some cases, makes the stays significantly more expensive than booking directly. So, I think Premier is great for the first year, SUB, but Elite may be more of a keeper card, if you can effectively use all its credits to offset that fee, because, if so, I think, that one ends up far ahead.

First I think this was a pretty fair and balanced article outlining the pros and cons of each card.

I agree with Ben that the only thing that’s valuable about Elite spending is a 6x dining bonus for 24 out of 168 hours of the week. The question is how many extra points you have to get a year to justify jumping through the coupon hoops in a world where there are better cards with coupons to hold. And most people don’t want more than one coupon card. So if you spend $1k a month on Fri and Sat nights that’s an extra 36k points compared to a 3x dining card. Not bad! What if you only spend $500 a month? Then just get a custom cash card and get 5x points instead of 6x. 12k points extra vs 18k. Just not worth the hoops for 6k points extra.

Look, Citi completely bungled the Elite launch, and the WSJ article was mortifying. If you are a HNWI, unless you are playing the game, you probably already have an Amex Plat or a CSR and the Elite offers nothing that folks don’t already have other than a handful of AA club passes - nothing to get off the couch for.

Meanwhile the Premier together with a doublecash (and a regular Strata for transit and haircuts!) has to be the best spending card comboout there right now. What beats it? Maybe C1VX/Savor? Certainly not CSR/FUn anymore. Citi has a winner if it wants card spend and should be promoting that. Too bad they really wanted to convert their HNWI into Elite cardholders and are falling flat on their face.

If the point is to just unlock AA and other transfers at 1:1, a lot easier to do $100 off $500 on a one night stay and take the 10x points. May be inflated by a few bucks but not by $100 and will get some points to compensate (Citi also giving you $5 for the inflation to start with as $95-$100=$-5).

Just so much easier than the Elite hoops - you run into the same problem anyway with the $300 off 2 nights. If you were getting more than 6x dining on weekend nights, fine, otherwise what’s the “point”?

Not inflated on the last hotel booking I just did in Boston. No surcharge.

what about travel protections between these cards? Do I book my VRBO with the strata premier to get the 3% (I understand it does code that way...pls tell me if I'm wrong!) or use my strata elite and get 1.5% to get better travel protection? Is there a difference?

Same question re: rental car abroad.

Thanks!