I didn’t realize just how frustrating downgrading the Citi Prestige card to the Citi ThankYou Premier card would be. Everything seemed straightforward when I started the process, but now more than 30 days following the downgrade call, the process is still not complete. Don’t get me wrong, call to downgrade my Citi Prestige call was extremely easy, but there was a lot of information I wasn’t told up front which would have been nice to know.
Annual Fee Refund Credits
My $450 annual fee for the Citi Prestige card posted on March 16, 2017. Generally from the date the annual fee posts, card holders have approximately 30 days to cancel or downgrade their card to receive a refund for the annual fee. When I called Citi to downgrade the Citi Prestige card a phone representative told me I’d have till March 30, 2017 to make a decision to avoid paying the fee. I requested the downgrade on March 29th and expected a credit on my Citi ThankYou Premier statement to offset the posted $450 annual fee. I mostly expected to find a $450 credit followed closely by a new $95 annual fee. Now more than a month after Citi completed my downgrade I have still not received a credit.
After waiting weeks for my credit to post I finally caved and called Citi to see what was happening. After a fairly long conversation, a Citi ThankYou Premier representative told me the annual fee credit takes up to 51 days! I must have seemed surprised by that answer because she quickly explained Citi does this just in case I don’t like my new card and decided to go back to the Citi Prestige. Personally I think that’s a ridiculous answer, but to each their own.
Final Thoughts
I couldn’t believe how easy it was to downgrade my Citi Prestige card to the Citi ThankYou Premier card. I figured the downgrade call would take a long time and the phone representative would try to offer me a ton of reasons to keep the card. In total it took about 10 minutes to downgrade my card to the Citi ThankYou Premier card. Less than a week later the new card arrived at my house. Receiving a refund for my $450 Citi Prestige annual fee has been the only difficult part of the process. I figured the credit would appear very shortly the conversion of my account, but unfortunately that isn’t the case. If you’re thinking about downgrading the Citi Prestige card make sure to do so before your annual fee posts to avoid winding up in this situation.
