It’s an exciting day for the Citi ThankYou program, as a new transfer partner has just been added!
Transfer Citi ThankYou points to American AAdvantage
Effective immediately, the American AAdvantage program has been added as a Citi ThankYou transfer partner.
If you go to Citi’s website for points transfers, you’ll now see this functionality live, with transfers being possible at a 1:1 ratio. I just made a transfer, and points moved over instantly.
We had reason to believe that this was coming. In late 2024, American and Citi announced an expansion of their partnership, whereby Citi will become the exclusive issuer of AAdvantage co-branded credit cards in the United States, meaning that American is dumping Barclays.
This development goes beyond just American’s co-branded credit cards, as we’re also increasingly seeing American integrated into Citi’s own ThankYou portfolio. This is a major update, since Citi not having American AAdvantage as a ThankYou transfer partner up until now has been a weak point of the program. Looking at the US airline industry:
- Delta has a longstanding partnership with American Express, and SkyMiles has been a Membership Rewards transfer partner
- United has a longstanding partnership with Chase, and MileagePlus has been an Ultimate Rewards transfer partner
We know that the agreement between Citi and American is becoming closer, so clearly integrating AAdvantage into the ThankYou ecosystem was a big part of that. This is super exciting for cards earning Citi ThankYou points, like the Citi Strata Premier® Card (review), plus the newly launched Citi Strata Elite Card.
This is a huge boost to the Citi ThankYou ecosystem
If you ask me, among the “big three” US airlines, American AAdvantage miles are by far the most valuable. American has excellent premium cabin redemption rates on partner airlines, and often also has reasonably priced awards on its own metal.
Now, admittedly AAdvantage miles aren’t as useful as they used to be:
- American now has dynamic award pricing for travel on its own flights, and we’ve seen the cost of many award types creep up over time (for example, one-way transatlantic business class awards on American metal now generally start at 75,000 miles, rather than the previous 57,500 miles)
- While American continues to have excellent award costs on partner airlines, the catch is that partner airlines are increasingly restricting their award space to members of their own programs, which is sort of an unofficial devaluation
Still, there are all kinds of situations where there’s big value to be had when redeeming AAdvantage miles, so I’d consider this to be phenomenal news, and I think it’s a big reason to get involved in the Citi ThankYou ecosystem.
To play devil’s advocate, one certainly wonders what impact this development will have on the value of AAdvantage miles. With American having another revenue stream for monetizing its AAdvantage program, will that make American likely to devalue its mileage currency more?
After all, Delta and United have allowed points to be moved from partners, and neither program is exactly known for great redemption rates, so…
Bottom line
It’s now possible to transfer Citi ThankYou points to American AAdvantage, which is an exciting development. We had reason to believe that this was going to happen, given that Citi and American announced a closer partnership late last year, and this is a logical aspect of that.
While AAdvantage miles aren’t quite as valuable as they used to be, this is still positive, as there are lots of solid uses for these miles. I hope this doesn’t lead to further devaluations of the currency, but…
What do you make of American AAdvantage being added as a Citi ThankYou partner?
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