H/T to our friend Tonei, but Citi has majorly improved its travel and protection benefits on pretty much all of its cards.

Beginning on Friday, I started getting emails from Citi titled Important information about your card’s protection benefits on pretty much all of my Citi cards, stating increased and more flexible coverage, starting May 15, 2016.

Citi benefits

Citi benefits

You can find a more extensive summary on Tonei’s blog, as I don’t want to steal his fire, but basically the changes are:

Travel protection benefits

  • Covered individuals now include pretty much any relative, and anyone travelling with them, from just the cardholder, authorized users, spouse or domestic partner, and dependent students. Strangely, the words “Authorized User” does not appear in this list, but I called Citi and they reassured me that authorized users were still covered
  • You now only have to pay for a portion of your trip with your Citi card or ThankYou points, instead of having to pay in full with your Citi card or ThankYou points, like before
  • Citi lifted the 60 day limit on the length of your trip for coverage, except for medical evacuation, which is still 60 days.

Purchase protection benefits

  • Citi Price Rewind has increased its benefits to a maximum of $300 per item and $1200 per year to $500 per item and $2500 per year
  • Return protection is now 90 days instead of 60 days
  • The extended warranty policy is now 24 months of primary coverage, instead of secondary coverage of double the warranty for policies under 1 year and an additional 1 year for longer policies.
  • Damage and theft protection is now primary instead of secondary, except for in New York

Conclusion

Citi has really stepped up its game recently. This is a great move by Citi that brings its card benefits in line with or better than most major card issuers. I’m also very surprised that the benefits have been increased over pretty much Citi’s entire range of cards (I even got an email about my Citi Forward!) I’ll definitely be using my Citi cards more in the future.

You can read all the benefit guides at this FlyerTalk thread here.