Last December I’d written about how I was mighty pissed about the Jet Airways Citibank Credit Card, since they key benefits were devalued. The upgrade vouchers were drying up and that was a key reason for me to keep the card.
Keeping that in mind, I’d switched to the Citibank Premier Miles Credit Card, which enabled a more ‘secular’ earning and burning I felt. I could earn 10 PMs per INR 100 for airline-related spend made directly with the airline or via a special portal called premiermiles.co.in. This is still better than earning 8 JPMiles per INR 100 for booking tickets only on Jet Airways, since I get 10 JP Miles if I chose to!
On top of that, I got 2 complimentary ticket codes, which allowed me an up to INR 1500 waiver on base fares on domestic tickets booked via the PremierMiles website. Additionally, for every INR 1,00,000 (USD 2,000) I spent, I could earn 1 more base fare complimentary ticket code (uptil 3!).
So I went about booking a lot of my airfare with this card, earning those 10x PM miles for every time I was flying (the Oneworld MegaDo, the trip to India Aviation, and work trips etc.!) and earned a neat stash of miles. Recently, Jet Airways announced a promotion where they were offering a 25% bonus on converting your credit card points/miles to JPMiles. While finding redemptions with JetPrivilege is a pain these days, given my options to transfer (Air India, Jet Airways, Kingfisher (!?), Thai Airways, Singapore Airlines and Cathay Pacific), I only thought it to be useful to convert the Citi PMs to JP Miles since it is still my primary mileage program and I could use these miles at will (book domestic for 20% mileage rates off, anyone?).
The Premier Miles Terms & Conditions stated it could take up to 3 weeks to convert these points to miles, so I thought it would be the right thing to do to make a test transaction to see how much time it takes. That ways, I could factor in when to push the buttons. I gave Citibank a call on Wednesday evening (May 2nd), and yesterday afternoon I had the transaction credit to my account! So, now I know I have all of month to earn more PMs before I can make up my mind about how many to transfer!
This is a wonderful offer, and too bad it comes once every two years, so do make use of it to convert your credit card miles and points into Jet currency if you please. Domestic tickets are no problem to find, however, it will take a while to get hold of international reward tickets.
Next up, I wanted to see how the complimentary ticket codes worked. So I went up to the PremierMiles portal and plonked the details of the tickets I needed. I booked a ticket from Goa to Mumbai (I’ll be doing the Mumbai Goa leg by train 
) and it worked quite well. I had 5-6 options to choose, and eventually I got a ticket in two minutes flat!
So now that I everything works, I am going to go ahead and put a lot more of my charges on this card. A full review coming up later, but I sure love this card!
Related Posts:
- Finally, a credit card which earns me lots of miles in India!
- Jet Airways Citibank Credit Cards devalue upgrade benefits with effect from September 2011
- Bye Bye Citibank Jet Airways Platinum Credit Card!
- Jet Airways offers 25% bonus on credit card conversions to miles till 31st May 2012
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I’m very jealous reading this post. The Citibank Premier Miles card in Singapore offering is no where near what you have over there!
By the way, an even better thing to do with your PM Miles is to redeem it at the PM Portal itself. That way, you have the option to redeem it on multiple airlines. On the other hand, once you transfer it to any other FFP, then you can redeem only on that airlines, and as we all know, getting airline to give us a free redemption ticket is easier said than done.
I once redeemed on PM Portal and was amazed by the options..and it worked like a song!
@Rajaram, I agree and disagree in the same breath. It is good to do that with domestic flights where the redemption rates are the same as the airlines, however, on international flights the miles asked for are way more. for instance, a round trip on jet airways economy BOM-SIN-BOM should cost 40K JP miles plus taxes/surcharges. using PM portal it would be 96K JP miles plus taxes. I think that is a massive wastage of the PM currency. And I save most of my miles for international redemptions anyways
yes thanks ! but Hyd – Blr segment typically operates only on Jet Konnect and redemption is 6k one way without the discount.
@ashwin, I don’t think jet intends to pare down redemption on lcc segments. Or maybe they will tail it with this 20pc discount! But no official stance yet on pulling the amounts down
Did you get the 25% additional miles when you transferred from Citi Premier Miles ? Another thing though Premier Miles redemption points are lesser than JP – eg: BLR – HYD is 4800 miles on Premier website as opposed to 6000 miles on Jet site, though now with the 25% discount on redemption, it works the same. a point to be noted.
@ the 25% additional miles will be credited at the end of the promo period (by experience) and not immediately.
As for the redemptions, thanks for pointing it out… 4800 is for LCC, 6000 for FSC Y and double that (i think) for FSC J. I will cover that when I analyse the card fully.