Compare the Features and Benefits of Citi Strata Premier® Credit Card and
Chase Ink Business Preferred® Credit Card

💳 This card earns Citi ThankYou points. Citi often runs transfer bonuses where you can get even more points when you transfer to airline or hotel partners at designated times. Transfer bonuses are awesome. Get 20%, 30%, 40% or more bonus miles when you transfer points at the right times. But they are easy to miss!

You can see all past Transfer Bonuses from Citi ThankYou points here.

Even better? Get notified when a new transfer bonus comes out and again before it ends (either or both, your choice). Sign up for free alerts right here. 🔔

Thanks to its long list of bonus categories and a generous sign-up bonus, the Citi Strata Premier® is one of the most lucrative points-earning cards at the $95 price point.

You can earn ThankYou® points through a variety of means, but one of the best aspects of the Premier is the broad array of bonus categories. You’ll get 3X points on five categories including air travel and hotels, restaurants, supermarkets, and gas stations + EV charging stations.

On the redemption side, the airline and hotel travel partners can unlock some incredible opportunities. One such sweet spot is redeeming Virgin Atlantic Flying Club points for partners such as Delta or ANA (although that latter redemption isn’t as good as it once was).

Two of the Citi Strata Premier card’s main competitors include the Chase Sapphire Preferred® card and Capital One Venture Rewards Credit Card. Those cards also offer transferable points — Chase Ultimate Rewards and Capital One Miles — as well as the same $95 annual fee.

Double up by Transferring Points from the Citi Double Cash Card to the Citi Strata Premier Card

The single biggest “weak spot” with the Citi Strata Premier Credit Card is that certain non-bonus categories only earn one point per dollar spent. The best credit cards give you two points per dollar spent in any category. Citi recently responded to the complaints by allowing customers to transfer points from the Citi® Double Cash Card to their ThankYou® Point balances.

What is the Citi Double Cash Card?

The Citi Double Cash Card is possibly the most user-friendly credit card out there. The Double Cash earns two ThankYou® points per dollar spent on every purchase, one cent when you make a purchase and another when you pay for the purchase.

There is no annual fee and no sign-up bonus for the Double Cash. It was created to be simple.

These points can be easily setup to be in the same ThankYou® account as your Premier card.

How To Double Up With Citi Double Cash and Citi Strata Premier

The “double up” is easy. All you need is a Citi Double Cash Card and a Citi Strata Premier card. Since the Double Cash has no annual fee, there’s no downside to having it.

Remember, the Citi Strara Premier Card pays 3X in certain categories (Air/Hotel, Gas, Restaurants and Supermarkets) and 1X in everything else. The Citi Double Cash card pays 2X on everything.

If your purchase is in a Citi Strata Premier card bonus category, go ahead and make the purchase with your Citi Strata Premier card.

If it’s in any other category, make the purchase with your Double Cash card. That way, you’ll get one percent when you make the purchase and another percent when you pay it.

The Citi Trifecta: Add a Citi Rewards+ Card for a 10% Points Rebate

If you want to take full advantage of the Citicards family, add in a no-annual fee Citi Rewards+ card. While the 15,000 ThankYou® Points that you’ll receive when you sign up (and spend $1,000 in the first three months) are nice, the real bonus comes from the redemption discount.

Every calendar year, Citi will rebate 10% of the first 100,000 ThankYou® Points that you spend. It’s a 10,000 annual TYP bonus! Best of all, you don’t ever need to spend on the card. Just having it in your profile and linked to the same ThankYou® account will ensure that you get the rebate.

Alternate Citi Trifecta

Add a Citi Custom Cash card, which earns 5% on your top bonus category each month, up to $500 in spend, and features some unique bonus categories like Home Improvement Stores, Drugstores, and Live Entertainment (Concerts and Shows). It also comes with a 20,000 point signup bonus worth at least $200.

Citi Application Limits (a.k.a. Citi Velocity Rules)

Citi will not approve more than two cards in a 60-day period, although we recommend 65 days, just to be safe. So if you want a Citi Strata Premier, Double Cash and Rewards+ card, you’ll have to pick one to wait and apply for on Day 66. We’d recommend waiting on the Rewards+, since the benefits are back-ended.

Each of these cards are limited to one signup bonus per 48 months.

Note: This card was recently rebranded from the Citi Premier® to the Citi Strata Premier®. You will be eligible for a signup bonus only if you have not received a signup bonus on either the Citi Premier® or the Citi Strata Premier® in the last 48 months.

Best Ways to Use Citi ThankYou® Points

There are several ways to redeem your Citi ThankYou® Points and, not surprisingly, some are better than others. Here are the most popular options.

Best: Transfer Points to an Airline Partner

The best use of ThankYou® Points is to transfer them to one of Citi’s airline or hotel partners.

All points transfer at a rate of 1:1 from ThankYou® Points into the partner miles. ThankYou® Points are particularly useful for international travel, since many of the partners are non-US airlines. You can, of course, use international airline miles to fly on domestic partners.

Some examples include: transfering to Singapore Airlines’ KrisFlyer program to fly their famous Singapore Suites, transferring to Turkish Miles&Smiles to get the absolute best award pricing for Star Alliance flights (hello, 7,500 mile one way flights from the mainland to Hawaii!), transferring to Virgin Atlantic for deals on flights from the US to Europe on Delta-metal and flights within North America on Delta as well as great rates on ANA flights to Japan and beyond.

Prefer spending points for hotels?

Citi transfers to Choice Hotels where some amazing bargains lie, especially at premium hotels.

If you have a Citi Strata Premier or Citi Prestige, you will get 2 Choice Privileges points per 1 Citi ThankYou® point transferred.

You can use this to book Choice Hotels properties, which include Comfort Inn, Sleep Inn, Quality Inn, EconoLodge, Rodeway Inn, Ascend, and Cambria, among others. And there is solid value on the discount side of its hotel offerings.

But if you like a bit more upscale…. that is where the Choice Hotels partnership with Preferred Hotels and Resorts comes into play.

You can search the above link to see all of the options, but here’s one example.

The Excelsior Palace Hotel on the Portofino Coast in Italy can easily exceed 400 Euros per night. Or it can be booked for 55,000 Choice Privileges points equal to is just 27,500 Citi ThankYou points. That’s ~ 2 cents per point in value.

Use for Travel or Gift Cards

It’s not our preferred way to use ThankYou® points, but if you don’t want to transfer your points to miles, you have the option to use them for gift cards. Citi offers gift card rewards from more than 100 partners, so you’re not going to be at a loss for options.

You can also book travel through Citi’s dedicated Travel℠ portal. There’s no real advantage in doing it this way other than that you can use your points to do so.

The downside to these options is that the per point value is not particularly good. You’ll receive a penny per point, which is generally less than the value of a mile in the “best use” scenario above.

Summary

We are big fans of the Citi Strata Premier. For a while, it lacked travel protections, but those are once again a feature of this card so on top of 3X bonus categories covering most categories a frequent traveler needs, it also has a range of trip protections.

3X ThankYou points on air travel and hotels, restaurants, supermarkets, and gas stations + EV charging stations is quite a generous range of bonus categories. for such a.minimal annual fee And as we mention above, it pairs well with other ThankYou-earning cards like the Citi Couble Cash, Citi Custom Cash, and the Citi Rewards+.

💳 This card earns Chase Ultimate Rewards points. Chase often runs transfer bonuses where you can get even more points when you transfer to airline or hotel partners at designated times. Transfer bonuses are awesome. Get 20%, 30%, 40% or more bonus miles when you transfer points at the right times. But they are easy to miss!

You can see all past Transfer Bonuses from Chase Ultimate Rewards here.

Even better? Get notified when a new transfer bonus comes out and again before it ends (either or both, your choice). Sign up for free alerts right here. 🔔

The Chase Ink Business Preferred credit card is a staple credit card for any business owner than understands the power of Chase Ultimate Rewards, one of my favorite rewards currencies (See the feature entitled “Earns Transferable Points” above for more on why.)

The Ink Preferred has two distinctions among the Chase Ink business credit card lineup with also includes the Chase Ink Business Unlimited® and Chase Ink Business Cash®.

1) While those cards have no annual fee, they also do not have the power, on their own, to transfer points to Chase’s airline and hotel partners – and that is where you get the most value. The Chase Ink Preferred, with its small annual fee, gives it the distinction of being able to transfer the points to partners like World of Hyatt.

So, for instance, you can earn 5X on office supply stores with the Ink Cash and 1.5X on spend categories that don’t otherwise have a bonus multiplier and then combine them all to your Chase Ink Preferred. In addition to being able to transfer to air and hotel partner programs, you also have the option to simply book travel on the Chase Travel site with each point worth 1.25 cents. Comparatively, the Ink Cash and Ink Unlimited would have points worth just 1 cent there – unless you also had an Ink Preferred to combine the points to.

2) The Ink Business Preferred has the highest bonus offer of any card, with 100,000 bonus points on offer when you meet the minimum spend in the allotted time from account opening. (See current offer above in “Key Facts.”)

But beyond that, the Chase Ink Business Preferred is a super powerful credit card for small business owners that spend a lot on select business categories like travel, internet, cable, and phone services, search engines/social media and shipping purchases, where you will earn 3X Ultimate Rewards points per dollar spent – up to a combined maximum of $150,000 per year. (You would earn 1 point per dollar over that limit.)

That’s some amazing earning power! If you max that out in a year, you are earning 600,000 points which we would value (at 1.75 cents a point) as worth over $10,000 in rewards value. Like I said – it’s a powerhouse of a card all on its own!

Even if you had no interest in travel and treated these points as cash back (which I certainly don’t think is the best way to use these points!), you are still earning 3% cash back on this spend.

And then there’s the benefits. This card absolutely rocks the benefits.

My favorite benefit is its included primary rental car insurance when you book for business purposes, put the entire rental cost on your Ink card and decline the rental company’s collision insurance. That means that you can decline the expensive collision insurance that your rental car company offers and, if there is damage or theft, Chase’s insurance will cover you on most rentals without involving your personal insurance. That could save you on future premiums.

Note: The list of credit cards that offer primary rental car insurance is extremely limited, so take advantage of this one.

But that’s far from the only benefit worth mentioning. Other notable card benefits include:

• Trip cancellation/interruption insurance, up to $5,000, for non-refundable passenger fares, hotels and tours.
• Up to $1,000 per incident for cell phone protection. The insurance covers you and your listed employees on the cell phone bill, when you pay your monthly cell phone bill with your Chase Ink Business card. You can make up to 3 claims per year with a $100 deductible.
• Extended warranty. For a manufacturer’s warranty of 3 years or less, Chase will add an additional year.
• Purchase Protection. Chase covers your new purchases for 120 days against damage or theft up to $10,000 per claim and $50,000 per account.
• No foreign transaction fees. Feel free to pay for goods abroad with the Chase Ink Business Preferred card and you won’t have to worry about foreign transaction fees.
• Of course, it comes with expected fraud protection and real time fraud monitoring with zero liability for you if you are a victim of fraud.

Note: You will only be approved for a Chase business credit card if you have applied for fewer than 5 personal credit cards within the last 24 months from any issuer. (Business credit cards do not count against the total, except for Capital One and Discover, but are subject to the policy).

Lastly, you will only be approved for (at most) one Chase business card every 30 days so please do not apply for two at once.

If you have applied for a Chase credit card and don’t get an instant approval, you may want to phone the Chase reconsideration line.

This card is also mentioned in the article Business Credit Cards That Don’t Report to Personal Credit Bureaus.