Citibank Prestige

For a very high yearly fee you expect Citibank to make it easy to live up to their sales pitch of extra benefits. In reality it's hard to even reach their concierge service. When you call their Citi Prestige Priority number there is no option for a concierge, you have to navigate through various voice prompts until finally you are given an option to press Zero to speak to someone. This person won't be a concierge either, and will eventually transfer your call, so you can finally speak to someone after about 5-10 minutes if you are lucky. So much for a concierge service, sorry for assuming it was meant to be on stand-by.

Then it gets better. I've called to book an airport transfer, and after spending quite a bit more time to give them all the details they said that I have to give them 72 hours notice, but because I've called 48 hours in advance they will try to put my booking as urgent and let me know within another 24 hours whether I have a booking or not - wow, I guess maybe they are still using fax to send and receive data.

But wait, there is more, when I've asked to also book a return transfer, they said that only one transfer applies for each itinerary. It happens that my return flight is on a different itinerary with a different airline, but they said that their definition of itinerary is if you going somewhere and then coming back to where you've started, so no return transfer, sorry!

I was actually trying to book a transfer there and back so I don't have to take my car, but if I can book only one way, then on the way back I have to pay to get a taxi, and because I live far away from the airport that will cost me quiet a bit. Do I sense that the Citi is doing it to make it more difficult for people to utilise their 2 complimentary airport transfers?

Then, there is a further issue with their transfers, which is that it's limited by kilometres. And because I live about 50 minutes from the airport, I end up paying about $85 extra to the driver one way!

Given the high yearly fee, you would expect that the Citibank would actually try to accommodate for their highest tier (prestige?) credit card users, but surely doesn't feel that way to me. At the very least I would suggest to add a direct number to their concierge service, as I'm pretty frustrated spending a lot of time and not getting what I thought was promised to me. And yes, I'm sure that the retort to this is that we did have a fine print, but still..it makes me nervous when I think that I rely on their complimentary insurance and other things. Hopefully those are better.